Curriculum Resource: Fling the Teacher

One of the fun free educational software programs that you can use to check your students' knowledge on a subject is "Fling the Teacher."  In this software, students get to change the look of the "teacher"--hair and skin color, hair style, mouth/teeth, accessories (glasses and earrings), etc.--stick him in a barrel, and fling him through the air using a trebuchet they construct by answering 15 questions correctly.  It is pretty much just a fact recall quiz, but it is kind of cute and the students enjoy building up their equipment until it is ready to toss the digital professor into the air.

We used this software this week in our 19th Century History Coop to review some of the facts about the Westward Expansion and Industrial Revolution in the US.  The link for this game is: http://www.solpass.org/7ss/Games/WestwardExpansion.html

There is another quiz about this time period as well, which you can see at: http://www.lisd.net/schools/briar/fling/Westward%20Expansion.html

What is nice about these games is that they are quick, so you can complete them in a short enough period of time that the students don't lose interest.  You can do them several times in a role to get enough right answers to complete your trebuchet and fling the teacher; the software scrambles the answers (and sometimes the questions), so the students really learn the questions they answered incorrectly at first on subsequent tries of the problem.  Best of all, the software is open to everyone to create your own quiz using your own questions for whatever subject you are studying.

Here is a website with a list of Fling the Teacher quizzes from American History.

Here is one with questions about World, but mostly European History.

Here is one with other subjects.

And if you want to make your own, here is where you download the software.

Or, even better, get your students to create one to demonstrate how much they have learned!