Tuesday 31 October 2017

The Amazing Race revisited Part 1

At the recent KL Summit I ran my "Amazing Race Google style" workshop. This is something I have been doing for a while (usually with staff as a beginning of the year activity). It does take a while to set up, but is well worth it. I originally got the idea from Wesley Przybyoski at the Google Apps Summit in KL (2015). Wes' Amazing Race Site


Last year I blogged about my staff Google Amazing Race here. Reading over it now, I noticed it is a bit light on detail and for my KL Summit version I added a few extra features. With this in mind I thought it might be time for a more detailed explanation and an update on how it could be used.


All of the resources and links can be found here geoffderry.com

I started with this slideshow (the music was blaring as the teachers started trickling in)


To start the participants got into teams of 3 or 4, they thought of a team name and created a team chant. They entered these details into a Google form. (this is how I collected the email addresses of each team) Once everyone was done we went around the room and each team shared their chant. (This gave me a chance to refresh Form Ranger in each of the google forms so that names were automatically added - but more about this later)

I explained how it was all going to work (see the slideshow)

To start the race I pressed the magic button in Form Mule and the first email was sent out to each team.
The teams had to
  • open the email, click on a link to a google MyMap

  • the MyMap contained a task

  • once they completed the task the participants had to fill out another form with the evidence

  • once the form was submitted a link to the next MyMap was sent and they repeated the performance

  • This continued (with live updates via the slideshow) until everyone (or at least one team) completed the race. I played music, walked around giving hints, took photos and just had lots of fun.

I also had some student helpers who actually joined some of the teams and added an extra element to the experience.

The whole thing was high energy, fun and some people even learned some things. All of the tasks were skills, apps or hints on how the participants could make their own amazing race.
I got lots of positive feedback from the participants. Including this quote

"will definitely do an amazing race activity for a summative in grade 4 and will also look into creating one of these for new staff orientation."



The winning team was of course

The legion of the Rainbow Unicorns

So how did I create all this mayhem and fun?



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