Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Gimkit – Add Fun Educational Games to Your Classroom”.
In this article, i will show you how to use a wonderful educational games, resource called gimkit.com. This site enables teachers and others to easily create educational games that are customized exactly to what you want to teach and learn. So here i am on gimpkit.com and i’ll click. Educator sign up, as it says here, students do not need accounts, they simply can join a teacher’s class by using a code as an educator, though i can sign up for gimpkit using a google account, or i can simply put in any email address that i have And click continue i’ll continue with google and that quickly i have a gimkit account.
It does want me to find my school so i’ll put in my country and in this case my zip code, my area of expertise and grade level that i teach and that quickly i have fully set up. My gimkit account. There’S a welcome message to help. You walk through some of the features in gimkit, but i’m going to close that, so i can show you how to use this great tool now. The first thing you need to know is that, in order to use kit, you need to set up some kits, and each kit is basically a topic or content that you want the students to learn. Now you can search for pre-made kits if you want.
These were created by other gimkit users. You can click here on search, kits and type in a topic, so spanish family is one example i’ll click on this one here and it brings up questions and answers. This is the question.
This is the correct answer and these are distractors. So if i like this kit, i can play it with my students. I can also copy it to my account and now you can see it is added to my list of kits.
But let’s say you can’t find a pre-existing kit that matches exactly what you want to teach or study. You can just go to your kits section click new kit give it a name, choose the language for your kit and then click next. You can choose a cover. Photo for your kit and then simply start adding questions. When i click add question i get a box where i can put in the question put in the correct answer put in some incorrect answers.
If i prefer to use images rather than text, i can remove the text and over here on the right, i can click to add a photo so that the students would have a few photos to choose from notice that you can have more than one correct answer. If you want so that’s a good option, it’s also possible to have the question itself be a photo or to be an audio based question. I can click, allow click to start recording and using my voice. I could pose the question rather than typing i’ll click add, and my first question is added to my kit now notice.
When you add questions you’re, not limited just to multiple choice, there is a text input option in these types of questions. The students would have to respond by typing the correct answer, so spelling becomes pretty important when students have to type in their answers, but notice that you can put in another correct answer. So there could be multiple answers that could be accepted as correct, for example, with the color white. It could be blanco, it could be blanca.
Both of those would be considered correct. I click add, and now i have. My second question give me a minute to add a few more questions and then i’ll resume the tutorial. Now that i have my list of questions together with the correct answers, i’m ready to play this activity with my students now before i leave this screen. I want to point out to you that there are other options for creating your questions. You can create with flash cards.
You can also set up question banks or import from spreadsheets, so i encourage you to check those options out if you’re interested i’ll click all done. So now i have two kits that i can use with my students, one that i found and copied and one that i created from scratch: okay, let’s say that the school day begins and it’s time to use this activity with my students. I could choose to simply assign it as homework, and this makes it an individual activity that the students do at home. It would be automatically graded by gimkit. So that’s one option, but in most cases teachers that use gimpkit it’s because they want to play the activity live with their students, so i’ll click play live, and this takes me to a screen with a list of games that i can use my kit with now. You may have noticed that gimpkid is giving me a message that i have a trial of gimkip pro for 14 days. I’M able to use all of the games that gimkit has created, but once those 14 days are up, i need to either pay for gimkit pro or my account converts to gimkit free. It used to be that gimkit free was very restrictive.
There were very few features for teachers that weren’t paying for gimkit, but recently gimkit opened it up so that whatever the featured games are any teacher, whether using the free account or the pro account you’ll be able to use these completely for free and you’re, using the Full versions of the games every so often gimkit is going to change, which games are featured and again, whatever games are featured, are freely available to you in their full versions. There’S also some other games, the popular picks, some classic twists. Those are only available for those with a pro account or if you have a free account, you can use them, but they’ll be very restricted. It’Ll be hard to use them with a full class of students, and you may be limited in the number of games. You can create with them, so you may want to stick to just the featured games at first until you decide whether it’s worth paying for gimkit, you can see right now. The featured games include the classic gim kit, where students compete individually against each other to try to earn gimkit cash, which is fake money that the students would earn based on their answers.
That’S one option or you could do a similar type activity, but in teams the students compete in teams and then, in addition to those two kind of classic games, they have a game called trust, no one at least right now. This is one of the featured games. It’S inspired by among us if you’re familiar with that fun game and then also there’s a game called fishtopia. This is a brand new addition to gimkit and it’s in a way kind of a virtual world that you can explore answer questions, so i would encourage you to check out those two featured games or whatever the currently featured games are in this tutorial.
I’M going to focus on classic so i’ll click on classic and continue. Next, i get to choose some of the settings for the game. What’S the game goal, is it to earn as much money as possible in a specified amount of time, or is it a race to reach a certain goal, or does the game end when the collective balance of all the earnings of all the players reaches a certain Amount in this case i’m going to choose race and i’ll set this just to ten thousand dollars. It is possible to set up a gimkit class if i had done that.
I could simply select the class and i would be ready to play the game with my class. It’S okay that i haven’t set up a class. Yet so that’s fine! Next, how much starting cash does each student start with, let’s say a hundred dollars? Next, do i want my students to be able to see the correct answer after they’ve selected their answer? Yes, i do think i want that. Do i want music to play in this case, i’m going to turn it off, but you may want that.
There’S clapping and there are a couple of other important options that you may want to explore. I do think it’s a good idea to allow students to be able to join late, so i’m pretty happy with those settings and i’m going to click continue and gimkit has set up a join code for my students, so in order to participate in this activity, my Students need to go to gimpkit.com, join and put in this code. Let’S try it out so gimkit.com join.
I tap enter so here i am acting as a student i’ll put in the game code. Click join i’ll put in my name. Click join.
I get some instructions. I need to answer questions to earn cash. I could use that cash to purchase upgrades and power ups to help me win the game and to help me earn cash faster. While students are waiting for each other to join, they can click to draw on the screen.
So that they can doodle while they’re bored and waiting back on the teacher screen, i can tell that one player has joined the game and now a second player has joined, let’s go ahead and click start game. This is what the teacher sees. Let’S switch back to see what the students are seeing. Here’S the question the student chooses the correct answer and earns a dollar in this case. I’Ll click continue click.
The next correct answer continue next correct answer. Now you’ll notice that each time the students get questions right, they’re earning slightly more points and at any point a student can decide to go to the shop and buy some power-ups. So as a student, i could buy a streak. Bonus bonus that stacks. When answering multiple questions correctly or i could buy a multiplier, every dollar in or out gets multiplied.
Let’S go with that. This is gon na cost me fifty dollars, i’m gon na i’m gon na go for it. I’Ll click continue to questions red is. Rojo, click continue. Let’S also try the streak bonus. You can see that for twenty dollars, i can get a streak bonus of three dollars.
So if i get multiple questions right in a row, i’ll get a bonus of three dollars but notice as you earn more cash. These bonuses get a lot bigger. I could buy a streak bonus of 35 000 per streak, but i would have to pay 20 million for that. So you have to think this through.
Is this gon na be worth it in the game, and it often is i’ll. Just buy the three dollar streak bonus now i’ll earn an extra three dollars for each question. You answer correctly in a row so now, when i click the right answer yeah, i got just two points or two dollars, but let’s go on a streak here now, i’m up to six dollars and now i’m up to 11, so that streak bonus is higher than It used to be now for the students at any time they can click here in the upper left on this plus sign, basically to see the list of players in the game.
They can also click here to go back to the questions at any time or to go to the shop. So let’s say a student is here in the shop. How do they get back to the questions? They can just click here in the upper left on these three lines and then go back to questions.
Let’S switch back to the teacher view you can see. As a teacher, i can look at how the game is progressing 189 dollars. There’S basically a record for me of all of the actions that are taking place. I can see my list of students here.
Jeff has a hundred dollars and charles has 89. now notice. If there’s a student that needs to be removed from the game, maybe he or she has to leave class. For some reason you can click here to remove that student from the game. You can also boost their balance by clicking on the plus sign.
You might do that because of good behavior or just because you want to give a student a boost, or whatever reason you might want to. You can also decrease their balance, maybe because of breaking a class rule or whatever reason you you choose and then, if you want, you can also ice a student. Let’S see what effect that has on charles.
It says you’ve been iced, wait three seconds, and so this is basically a little bit of a penalty where you have to have a little break from the game for a minute again, you as the teacher, decide or set up the rules for when that happens. So at this point, the students would just continue to answer questions and play until someone reaches the goal. Now for the teacher notice here in the upper right, you can toggle the music on or off. You can also end the game early if you’d like and i’m gon na, go ahead and do that when the game ends, as you can see, you get a leader board showing the first second third place, etc, and, as a teacher, you also get a report. You can click view report to see how the students did in addition to this student overview. I also get a general overview and a question breakdown.
I can see which questions were answered correctly, what the percentage was. So this question breakdown in combination with the student overview. Those two items can really help me with some formative assessment for the students they can clap if they’d like they do see their final balance and how many questions they answered correctly and the leaderboard okay, i’m going to click on gimkit to go back to the main Gim kit screen for teachers – and i just want to remind you that what we just did was – we played one of the four featured games that are available to anyone right now in gimkit pro users free users. Anyone can use these for completely unlocked for now, and the game we played was classic. If you wanted to do teams, it’s pretty similar, except that you’re working with others to build up your cash total and your team is trying to beat out the other teams or you could try one of these other two games. These other games below right now, they’re free for me to use fully for 14 days, but once those 14 days are up, i would need to either upgrade to a pro account or i would lose the ability to use these other games with large groups of students.
So i would be limited, i believe, to five users per game and i’m limited in the number of games i can produce and things like that, there’s just limitations that will appear. So i find this new version of gimket to be wonderful. It allows me to always have i would assume at least four games that i can fully use with my students and one of the nice things about. It is that these kits that i create they can be used with any of the featured games.
So it almost doesn’t matter what the currently featured games are. Whatever they are, i can play them with my students using the kit that i’ve created or the kits that i’ve found. So i would encourage you to check out gimkit see if you like it see if your students like it, i think, you’ll find that it adds a lot of fun and engagement to just about any classroom. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did please like follow and subscribe, and when you do click the bell so you’ll be notified. When i post another video, if you’d like to support my channel, consider clicking the thanks button below the video or you could support me through my patreon account, or by buying channel merch and you’ll, see more information about those options below the video .