This Jeopardy Labs lesson plan is intended to assist educators in making the most of the online digital learning platform to support teaching and learning.
Jeopardy Labs is an exciting online and educational spin on the popular television game Jeopardy. It is formatted similarly to the TV version, with the main focus being on answering questions organized by categories and earning various levels of points based on the difficulty level of the question. What is Jeopardy Labs and how can it be used in the classroom?
Read More: 5 Lessons For Teachers From Ted Lasso
Jeopardy Labs is extremely adaptable, and teachers of all subjects can use it to enhance their lessons and engage their students. The emphasis of this sample lesson plan is on middle school social studies, with a wide range of related topics covered.
- Social Study is the subject.
- Civics, Economics, History, Government, and Citizenship are some of the topics covered.
- Middle School Grade Band
- The goal of Learning:
- Students will be able to do the following at the end of the lesson:
- Understand civics, economics, history, government, and citizenship content.
Create multiple-choice questions about civics, economics, history, government, and citizenship. - Answer questions about civics, economics, history, government, and citizenship correctly.
Provide an overview of the different content and topics that have been covered throughout the unit or academic term that relates to social studies topics of civics, economics, history, government, and citizenship using any type of creative presentation tool, such as Canva(opens in new tab) or Slido(opens in new tab). Consider using VoiceThread(opens in a new tab) to create the review if the class is asynchronous online or if you want the content available online for future review.
Because social studies is so broad, and because each Jeopardy Lab game will have multiple columns, consider covering content from all of the social studies domains (civics, economics, history, government, and citizenship).
If your unit or class only focused on one of those, say, history, you could have five areas focused on different decades, wars, events, and so on. If your class is solely about government, you could divide it into five sections that cover governmental branches, laws and legislation, important governmental figures, and so on.
Team Jeopardy Lab Creation
After reviewing the social studies content and re-familiarizing students with it, they can use their knowledge to create questions for the Jeopardy Lab game. Because each Jeopardy Lab board will need at least 25 questions (five questions per column, one column for each of the five social studies domains covered in this lesson), creating the Jeopardy board in groups would be ideal.
Students will have more opportunities to learn and master the content if they participate in creating questions for the Jeopardy Lab board. Soft skills such as strong communication and collaboration abilities can also be developed.
You can choose whether to divide students into teams based on topic or to have each team cover all topics and create a full Jeopardy Lab board. The goal is to have several Jeopardy Lab boards available for use in the Jeopardy Lab Tournament.
Jeopardy Lab Tournament
After working in groups to develop the questions for the Jeopardy Lab games, it is time to practice answering them.
In place of a traditional test or question-and-answer session, each student team’s Jeopardy Labs games can be used to create a Jeopardy Lab Tournament. Each team can have one member represent them in each round, and at the end, a tournament of champions (previous winners) can compete against one another.
How Can Jeopardy Labs be Used with Families?
There are numerous ways to involve families in Jeopardy Labs. Teachers can send links to the student teams’ Jeopardy boards to families so that they can practice answering the questions at home.
The students’ Jeopardy Lab tournament can also be a fun family engagement experience, with families able to participate virtually or in person for a family game night and play as teams with their children.
There are numerous ways to use Jeopardy Labs to engage students in lessons. You were given an idea for incorporating team learning and gamifying learning into this sample lesson.
Give Jeopardy Labs a try for your next lesson because it is so versatile, with the ability to be used in a wide range of grade levels and subject areas. By putting together the questions, students will not only be able to better retain the content, but they will also improve their collaboration and communication skills while working in groups, and they will enjoy learning through positive and supportive competition.
