30 Seconds!

The Gist

• One of the players will be the caller. She takes the top card from the deck. She will have 30 seconds to describe as many concepts from the card as she can, but all without mentioning the name of the concepts.
• The other player(s) of the team will have to guess the concepts. Every good guess earns the team a point.
• The team with the most points wins!

That’s it. It’s a fun activity to have near the end of a course to cement in the concepts the students have learned.

 

Characteristics

• Duration: approx 15-20 minutes
• Applicable Knowledge Components: usable for all statistical concepts
• Bloom’s revised Taxonomy: Factual + Remember & Factual + Apply
• Required materials:
  • paper and pens (to write the cards) -Stopwatch (use a digital timer on laptop or phone or use 30 second hourglasses)
• Introduced by: Idwer Doosje, Utrecht University

Setting it up

Here are some more tips for setting up this activity. Feel free to change and adapt it to your specific situation.

Form groups

• Students form teams of 2-3 people.
• 2-3 teams form a group

Write cards

• All the students think of concepts they have learned in the course
• They write these concepts on cards. Every card should have 5 different concepts
• The students in one group can coordinate to make sure all cards have different concepts on them and concepts do not appear more than once or twice. Students are not allowed to talk about the concepts however.
• When they are done, they should have at least 6 cards with 5 concepts on them.

Switch decks

• The students stack the cards into a deck
• Groups now switch decks.
• Every group (consisting of at least two teams of two people) now has a different set of cards