***EDIT: I have removed this material. I had uploaded it with the understanding that it was being provided as a free service to my fellow teachers here, but the site admin has decided to lock it behind a paywall. I object to that quite strongly, and will be removing all of my content as a result. I will update this post with more information when I find somewhere new to host it for free.***
Hey, guys and gals. I thought I'd share a ppt game I made with you all. It's easily the most ambitious ppt game I've ever made, and I'm not afraid to admit I'm fairly pleased with myself.
A word of warning right from the start, though: Make sure the game works on your classroom computer before you use it in class.
It works fine on my home computer and on the computer I'm currently using at this school, but on several of the other computers I've tried it on (I taught at four schools last semester), some of the animations reset when they weren't supposed to. If you know how to fix that, then cool beans, do it. I ended up drawing the scoreboard on the whiteboard in the classes that had problems, but that was a bit of a faff, so you might be better off not using this game if it doesn't run properly on your computer.
Now, this is a baseball game, and it's meant to be scored using baseball scoring and baserunning rules. That means if you aren't familiar with those rules (like those of you unfortunate enough to be from countries that don't play it), you'll have to use an alternative scoring method.
I included notes beneath all the slides to explain them, but here's a quick rundown of the game:
Click a letter on the menu screen to go to a question slide.
On the question slide, clicking the green "O" will make the answer appear, and clicking the red "X" will take you back to the menu screen.
Clicking the answer box will make a large, spinning baseball appear. Clicking on the baseball will take you to a random reward/point slide. Yes, it's completely random, so the students won't be able to memorize what Letters have what reward and try to get the best ones all the time. It wil be different every time you play it.
Remember: When tailoring the template to suit your lesson, you have to right click the pictures you insert and choose "send to back." If you don't, the spinning baseball will appear behind the picture, and you won't be able to click it.
The reward/point slides included are: Single, Double, Triple, Home Run, and Out.
Clicking anwywhere on the reward screen will take you to the scoreboard screen.
The scoreboard screen has the following functions:
- A score tracker for each team, one in each top corner. Clicking the black rectangles will advance the score by one point. Big thanks to whoever made the Mario game template I took that from, haha.
- Clicking a base on the diamond will make a baserunner icon appear on that base. Clicking the icon will make it disappear.
- The grey circles represent outs. Clicking one will make a red "X" appear inside it. Once they have three outs, clicking the third red "X" will clear all outs and baserunners.
- Clicking the baseball icon in the lower right corner will take you back to the menu screen.
By baseball rules, a team will keep playing until they record three outs, at which point the other team gets their turn. However, if you don't want to play by traditional rules, you can always just let the teams take turns as you would with any other bomb game, and award points based on the numbers on the reward slides, rather than the number of baserunners that cross home plate (ie single = 1 point, double = 2, etc).
I used traditional scoring and the students really seemed to enjoy it, once they caught on to how it worked. I can see this going over particularly well with boys classes, or classes that are particularly competitive.
Anyway, I hope this works for you, and I hope you and your kids enjoy it.
