A GAME APPROACH TO TEACHING FACTS

Note: This article was scanned using OCR from the March 1985 CCCE Newsletter. Please contact us if you identify any OCR errors.

A GAME APPROACH TO TEACHING FACTS

A program named TRIVGAME, written in Microsoft BASIC for the TI Professional Computer, the IBM Personal Computer and capatibles, allows 1-8 contestants to choose 1-6 categories of questions to answer in the manner made so popular by the game Trivial Pursuit.

As play proceeds, an on-screen scoreboard displays the progress of each contestant. The first one to correctly answer a chosen number of questions in each category is the winner, and a song is played to honor the victory.

TRIVGAMS uses random numbers to choose questions from text files residing on the disk. In contrast to the truly trivial questions that are included in the commercial board games, the object in an educational setting is to create files of questions that have a measure of significance. For example, it is not educational to ask for the birthplace of Linus Pauling, but a good question would be to ask the name of the American who won Nobel Prizes for both Chemistry and Peace.

The goal is to encourage students to learn a large number of "good things" about vari­ous subjects, to be exposed in a casual setting to numerous facts that almost never find their way into formal courses in spite of their inherent significance. For example, it is good for chemistry majors to know that helium gets its name from the Greek word for sun, because it was first "discovered" there by virtue of its spectral lines. They should somehow learn that our system of element symbols and formulas started in Sweden with the brilliance of Berzelius, that light bulbs are filled with argon to minimize evaporation of tungsten from the hot filament, that aluminum doesn't dissolve in the rain because of a tight thin layer of oxide.

Because TRIVGAME reads whatever question files are provided, it is possible for teachers and students to make up their own sets of questions in whatever categories they desire. There could be a file of questions for individual courses in the curriculum. Or perhaps an analyti­cal professor would like to make a file dealing with modern instrumental analysis, or with environmental chemistry. An all-history collection could have separate files for organic chem­istry, physical chemistry, nuclear chemistry, inorganic chemistry, chemical technology, and so on.

An important characteristic of such files is that they may easily grow larger, as parti­cipants suggest additional questions. Also, any one question might well be placed in more than one file. For example, a question on iodine clock reaction could be placed in the inorganic and the kinetics, and the miscellaneous file. A utility program, TRIVSORT, takes care of proper addition of new questions to existing files.

For those who are interested in obtaining the programs, please send $10.00. A disk con­taining the programs will be forwarded which will run on the TI or IBM PC.

*Department of Chemistry Carleton College Northfield, MN 55057