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Macroecon Lesson Starter: Got a spare million quid?
9th June 2011
Have you seen the Channel 4 game show ‘Million Pound Drop - Live’ recently? It struck me that it was a wonderful way to make a simple multi-choice quiz a bit more exciting. I created this Powerpoint resource to liven up a simple exam-style Macroeconomic multi-choice set of questions. Unfortunately, I haven’t got a million quid to give away with it!
Ever conscious of copyright issues, I’ve re-titled the resource ‘40 Drop’, but the principle remains the same. The Powerpoint file has 10 questions and the students can play individually or in small groups. Each student/group has 40 points to play with initially. In each round, they can spread these points over the answers but they must always leave one answer clear of any possible points (note: questions 8 & 9 only have 3 possible answers, question 10 only has two possible answers). The students have 60 seconds (there’s a timer at the bottom of the screen) to decide how to spread their points.
After the time is up go through the answers by clicking on the space bar - this will let each incorrect answer ‘drop’ away until you are left with just the correct answer. This is your opportunity to go through each wrong answer and allow your students to learn about why they might have got answers wrong.
The student should record the amount of points that they have left at the end of each round on their ‘Dropsheet’ (i.e. the points they scored on the correct answer) – this is the number of points they have for the next round. Should a student run out of points before the end of the 10 questions then they can carry on just answering the questions (for fun!). The objective is to keep as many of your 40 points as possible.
Sorry if this is too late for this year’s exam! Feel free to alter the questions if you want to use this for any other subject.