Later on in class, we played 20 questions. Yes, the same 20 questions game that you probably played when you were a child. If you never played (that's a shame), the rules for the game in class were as follows:
- The teacher thought of a person, and kept this person secret from us
- The class gets to ask 20 questions
- The questions MUST be yes/no questions - they cannot be open ended
- The teacher can lie twice during the game, and in the end he has to say whether or not he lied, but doesn't have to say which question(s) he lied on
The real point of having us play this game was not for fun. Rather, it was to get us to understand the important of questions and how to structure questions. For example, the best method (we found) was to ask binary questions first, because the eliminate the most possibilities. For example, asking "is this person a male?" and eliminating an entire gender of possibilities is much more productive than asking "does this person live in Michigan?" There was a much bigger struggle in coming to a consensus on which questions to ask and when than I had anticipated there would be. I wonder if this would be a beneficial "game" to play with our students at the secondary level. The younger kids might not understand the strategy behind it, but I would think it would be good for the older grades.
By the way, in case you were wondering, the person that our teacher was thinking of in the 20 questions game was Sarah Palin.
Happy Tuesday!
By the way, in case you were wondering, the person that our teacher was thinking of in the 20 questions game was Sarah Palin.
Happy Tuesday!
Hi Morgan,
ReplyDeleteI was also wondering about how I would make the 20 questions game work in my classroom. Having the group develop the questions was really fun and hard, but as you say, we were able to understand the value in thinking about how effective our questions were. I wonder how you could get a group of high school students to think about this. Maybe if you had them talk about a "good question" first and try and define what makes a question good in the context of the game. Then, periodically throughout the game, the teacher could pause and go back to the ideas the students brought up to compare them with the questions that had been asked so far. I'm not sure though. It's definitely some high-level thinking we were engaging in...
hey Morgan,
ReplyDeleteThat is really interesting to think about playing this game in our classrooms. Do you think there is a place for it in a math classroom such that it would relate to our content? I like the idea of students practicing asking questions, since this is such an important skill to have. To not only absorb what we learn, but to think about what we don't know and what questions we can ask to find out what we do want to know. As we've been seeing in 695, asking a research question often time is what initiates gathering and analyzing data. This inclination toward inquiry would be a great habit to foster through a fun and engaging game. Great idea!
Hi, Morgan,
ReplyDeleteI also noticed how long it took for us to come up with questions. For some of them, it was almost excruciating how long it actually took. While I think that being able to formulate effective questions is a good skill, I also noticed that in the time we had, our class was only able to ask ten of the twenty questions we could have asked. It seemed to me that most of the time we took to think of questions wasn't on coming up with ideas for questions, but rather how to word questions in a certain way. I have to wonder how the game would have been different if instead of worrying about the exact wording of questions and only being able to ask ten questions, we had asked questions the way people proposed them and got through all twenty questions.