Week 7: Gimkit
Many people were raving about Gimkit at ASTE and naturally I had to try it out with my students. Gimkit is a classroom quiz game and learning tool made by Josh Feinsilber, a high school student from Seattle. How cool is that?! The game-play is similar to Kahoot! in which students use a code to join the game and then answer questions on their own device.
After signing up, you begin by creating "kits" to create quizzes. You have the options to create from scratch, import an existing quiz from Quizlet or a CSV file, or copy quizzes from the Gimkit gallery to modify for your use. I personally love that I can pull from Quizlet and edit to fit my own needs. It took seconds to create a game for the class on Friday when we had a few extra minutes at the end of class.
I have only played Gimkit with my students as a live game, but there is an option to create a kit and assign it for student completion within a specific time frame. Students can then complete the game at their own pace within the due date.
Now to the really exciting part about Gimkit! As students answer the multiple choice questions, they earn money for answering questions correctly and lose money for answering incorrectly. As they earn money, they can spend it on different upgrades and powerups to help them earn more money or hinder their opponents. This added level of strategy really increased the participation and excitement for my students. When they have earned enough money they can go to the shop and purchase items like:
- More money per question (gained and lost)
- Streak bonus (to earn more money after you answer two questions correctly)
- Multiplier (every dollar in OR OUT gets multiplied)
- Insurance (you only pay out a certain amount when you get a question incorrect)
- Subtractor (removes 20% of an opponents $)
- Reducer (limits a players earnings by 50% for 1 minute)
There are tons of others as well and more to come as Gimkit continues to be improved. And the teacher has the ability to turn on or off the "attack" type powerups if you would rather play without them for younger students.
As the teacher you have access to a Gimkit dashboard to view student progress and earnings and additional formative data. You can look at data for the entire class or you can focus on individual students. The data shows you how many times a students attempted each question and how many times they got each one right or wrong.
Currently you can create 5 kits for free to try it out with your students. After you have used your 5 kits, you must choose a purchase option to continue.
As I noted, on Friday I played it with a couple of my classes to fill the last few minutes of class. This weekend, as per their request, I have put together a few more kits for them to play on Monday and honestly, I'm not sure who is more excited: me or the students!
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I love the additional feature of using points to strategically put yourself at an advantage as a player. Fun resource, thanks for sharing
ReplyDeleteWow, what will they think of next for getting students to learn? This would probably be a terrific motivator in the right class.
ReplyDeleteGreat post Heather! Gamification... I have used some similar tactics for engagement as part of a Learning Management System. How cool fo you to be able to share with your class and get immediate feedback on a particular tech tool. There are a few similar types of applications like Quizizz, Quizlet and Kahoot you mentioned. In my previous Gamification EDET class we used Kahoot as part of our groups class project to gamify classroom content! Holly was on our team and implemented in her classroom is was literally a "hoot" to see the kindergartner's engage with it and they were into it! I wonder what the price differences are between the different applications.
ReplyDeleteMy class is super competetive so they would love all the upgrades that they can buy. I like how it integrates with Quizlet so you don't have to recreate an entire quiz.
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