Quiz Tools - The Ultimate Showdown

This week was a revision week before my year 10's next big assessment. So I decided to run a little competition. The students could choose any quiz app they pleased and then the following lesson we'd play the quizzes.

Round 1
Quizlet was knocked out the competition straight away, because none of the year 10s wanted to develop quizzes for that platform and neither did any students choose Socrative. So they didn't make it to the final!

Round 2
The two finalists were Quizizz and Kahoot Students enjoyed creating questions for both platforms and the process was pretty similar.

The Grand Finale
I used a Single Google Sheet to coordinate the quizzes. Each student gave me an url to direct the quiz. I then used a random name picker to choose the quizzes.

Let Battle Commence! 

Both platforms feel like a quiz show with countdowns and music.

Class Game Vs individual

The first key difference is that in Quizizz students play through all the questions when they choose to start the game. This enables students to do the exercise when they have finished another task or it can even be set for homework.  Whilst on Quizizz they were highly focussed on their screens but they were not so directly competing with each other.

In Kahoot the whole class plays together, which adds to the sense of community but means everybody has to play the same quiz at exactly the same time!

Question displayed on Main Screen Vs at Your device

Quizizz also displays the questions on the students device, so not everybody has to see the projector, which is a real advantage in rooms with poor visibility.

Logins
We had no difficulties at any point logging into Kahoot and this weekend I had over 80 players at once playing it. With Quizizz we did have one or two small login problems, but all were fixed with the judicious use of the refresh button.

Who won?




The students narrowly gave the win to Kahoot! They acknowledged the fact that Quizizz enables quizzes to be given out as homework and they enjoyed using both.  So it was a noble contender that we hope goes from strength to strength!

Python Programming Games

Most students are interested in programming, because eventually they would like to make games. Games are the rockstars of the computing world and a great way to hook people into the idea of coding!  Python is one of the languages that coders actually enjoy using!   In this posting, I am going to share some of the resources availabe to get you started:

My first choice for a book is http://inventwithpython.com/  and for a large range of resources PyGame is great as it adds the extra libraries you need to make graphically rich games.  There is a nice set of documentation to get you started in this area.  Codecadamy also has an excellent Python section, although it doesn't focus so much on games.

Built into the Raspberry Pi are a few games that you can play with the source code.

There are some lovely Hour of Code tutorials for Python to give students a taster and there's also a gamified system that teaches code, calded CodeCombat. This is well worth a look to get students started.