KZBlog

As is usual, I’ve become busy particular as school has started. This year, I’m working very closely with a school and I have all sorts of interesting experiences to relate and some observations but I prefer to let a little time and distance pass before blogging about them so that they are less recognizable. And so I have some distance on them before unleashing my first, possibly wrong, impression.

In the meantime, I haven’t had much free time to blog even as a bill to make Nazarbayev President-for-life is in the works and Vinokourov made a failed bid to become manager of Team Astana instead of a rider (I thought he spent two years dying to get back on his bike). Not to mention alien hiergoglyphs left in South Kazakhstan. Hopefully I’ll get some time to cover these issues in detail.

What I have been doing in my free time is working with a few teachers to develop a Jeopardy html program! I introduced the idea of playing Jeopardy (or Своя Игра) in the class, to review for tests or just for fun. The teachers were amazed and we improvised a basic method of drawing the board on the whiteboard and then typing up the questions on paper. We discussed whether to write the questions on the board or to do it orally. Now my school is equipped with smartboards or interactive boards and so we have computers with the images projected to the front of the class. And we can use a pen-like thing as a mouse to click on stuff. One teacher and I decided it would be a lot of fun to design an interactive Jeopardy board. We decided to use html because 1) I know enough html to pull it off and 2) we figured every classroom with a computer has an internet browser. However we didn’t want to put it online because not every classroom has internet access and because teachers should be able to change the questions!

Since a lot of ESL teachers coming to KZ get on this blog, I figured I’d post our files here. This particular game is designed to test Unit One of Straightforward Elementary. But it should be easy to change the questions (if slightly painstaking). If you want to check it out, just download the link below. Board.html is the Jeopardy Board. Clicking on each dollar amount brings up the question. There is then a link to the answer. On the answer page, there’s a link back to the board and that dollar amount has disappeared.

If you want to edit it, open Board in Notebook or a text editor and find the categories. Change those to whatever you want. To change the questions, go to the subfolders 1,2,3,4 and 5. Each numbered folder corresponds to a category. In each folder is the question file named 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500. And the answer files, named 100a, 200a, 300a, 400a and 500a. So use a text editor to replace my questions and answers with your own.

There is also a Final Jeopardy game. If you go to the board and scroll down, you’ll see the final jeopardy picture. Click on it to bring up instructions (this file is located in the fj folder, fj.html) and give the students time to decide how much to bet. Then click on question, which takes you to the file fjq.html. The Jeopardy theme may or may not play depending on your browser, but in a ideal world it will play 4 times, or for 2 minutes. Get around this by simply playing it in your computer’s audio player. fja is of course the answer page.
Here are the files. It should be good to go. Just download it, save it to your computer, open the folder and open board.html.

Jeopardy.zip

If there are any computer geeks hanging around who want to improve it, I’d love to see:

*reliable MP3 playing (preferably with a loop of 4 times) so the theme will play in all browsers
*automated score keeping would be awesome, a separate screen maybe with points that are automatically added
*A wizard program that would let teachers change questions and answers easily. I imagine something like you start a setup program and it asks you to enter your categories, then enter each question and answer, then save it all.
*Animations or some kind of fun transitions.

But I would like to ideally keep it lightweight and also able to run on any normal computer (so some teacher in a village can run it without installing the latest Shockwave plug-in and so on.