Answer: Jeopardy Labs is an exciting online and educational take on the popular TV game Jeopardy. It is formatted similarly to the TV version, with the main focus being answering questions that are organized by categories, and earning different levels of points depending on the difficulty level of the question.
Question: What is Jeopardy Labs and How Can It Be Used for Teaching?
Jeopardy Labs is extremely versatile, and teachers of all subject matter can use the platform to enhance their lesson and engage students. For this sample lesson plan, the focus is on middle school social studies, covering a wide range of related topics.
Subject: Social Studies
Topic: Civics, Economics, History, Government, and Citizenship
Grade Band: Middle School
Learning Objective:
At the end of the lesson, students will be able to:
- Understand content related to civics, economics, history, government, and citizenship
- Develop questions related to civics, economics, history, government, and citizenship at different levels of difficulty
- Accurately respond to questions related to civics, economics, history, government, and citizenship
Social Studies Content Review
Using any type of creative presentation tool, such as Canva or Slido, 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. If the class is asynchronous online or you would like the content available online for future review, consider using VoiceThread to create the review.
Since social studies is quite robust, and because you will have multiple columns in each Jeopardy Lab game, consider covering content from all of the social studies domains (civics, economics, history, government, and citizenship).
If your unit or class only focused just on one of those, for example, a history course, you could have five areas focused on different decades, wars, events, etc. Or, if your class is focused solely on government, you could have five areas focused on governmental branches, laws and legislations, important governmental figures, etc.
Team Jeopardy Lab Creation
After the social studies content has been reviewed and students are re-familiarized with it, they can use their learning to create questions for the Jeopardy Lab game. Since each Jeopardy Lab board will require at least 25 questions (five questions per column, with one column per each of the five domains of social studies being covered in this lesson), creating the Jeopardy board in teams would be ideal.
By having students engage in creating questions for the Jeopardy Lab board, they will have additional opportunities to learn and master the content. In addition, soft skills related to strong communication and collaboration skills can also be fostered.
You can decide if you split students in teams by topic area or have each team cover all topics and create a full Jeopardy Lab board. The goal is to have multiple Jeopardy Lab boards to use for the Jeopardy Lab Tournament.
Jeopardy Lab Tournament
After spending time in teams creating the questions for the Jeopardy Lab games, it is time to experience answering the questions.
As opposed to a traditional test or question-and-answer session, the Jeopardy Labs games from each student team can be used to set up a Jeopardy Lab Tournament. Each team can have one member represent their team each round, and then at the end, a tournament of champions (previous winners) can further compete with one another.
How Can Jeopardy Labs be Used with Families?
Many ways to engage families with Jeopardy Labs are available. Teachers can share the links to the student team-made Jeopardy boards with families, and practice answering the questions at home.
The Jeopardy Lab tournament created by the students can also be a fun family engagement experience, in which families can join in either virtually or in person for a family game night and play as teams with their children.
The ways to use Jeopardy Labs to engage students in lessons are numerous. For this sample lesson, you were provided with an idea to include team learning into the lesson, as well as gamifying learning.
Since Jeopardy Labs is so versatile with the ability to be used in a wide range of grade levels and subject areas, give it a try for your next lesson. Not only will students be able to better retain the content by putting together the questions, they will also improve their collaboration and communication skills working with teams, and enjoy learning through positive and supportive competition.
