Empire!

This exercise aimed to gamify working out past papers and its game structure can be adapted for different types of revision work.

Students are given a brief description of the game.
Students have two minutes to memorise a list of great names in Computing;
Then students have 2 minutes to list as many names as they remember and decide if they would like to form an alliance with a friend to share the names on their list;
Students are then given 10 minutes to Google each name on the list and decide what each person can bring to their Empire (e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc.);
The teacher then gives each student a secret identity as one of the people on the list (e.g. on a piece of paper)
The teacher asks the first student a question and if he gets it right he gets to ‘attack’ a class mate’s empire by:
- guessing who that student is
- if he guesses right, he also says what that person will bring to his Empire (e.g. Microsoft, Twitter etc.)
If the student guesses right, his classmate will have to join his Empire and will hitherto belong in his Empire.
Gameplay continues until one student has conquered all Empires.
The game continues until one students has conquered all the class and is crowned class Emperor.
To further gamify the experience:
- Random timers are set during the game: when a timer goes off, the student being questioned gets to choose an Empire to break up.

Students found this activity very morivating and got into the competitive element. The activity took two double lessons.