Update on Reality Games: Some Adjustments

Men at the recruiting office at the Town Hall, Melbourne, to enlist for service in World War I.

We’ve made some adjustments to the scoring of our reality game.  Now, instead of each child tracking their own points, we’ve combined them into a family pool of points.

This makes it even more of a co-opetition. Siblings, especially the most competitive ones, are now more prone to reminding each other to hurry and answer the questions, helping each other out so the total score can rise higher.  We also don’t discourage hinting as long as its not overtly handing the answers out.

And, we’re very up-front in telling them where the line is between regurgitating Wikipedia entries and actually doing the research and critical thinking that will form the best responses.

Chewy, upon realizing that the questions were starting to skew towards the older siblings’ abilities, took it upon himself to write his own set of ability-appropriate questions that he and Go-Girl could do together. That was a huge win in my book.

Here are tonight’s questions to be answered tomorrow:

What’s the difference?

…between voluntary & involuntary muscles? Give one example of each.

How many?

…languages are spoken in Ghana? Name five.

What happened?

Sketch a timeline (decorated with illustrations, if you wish) of the events of World War I, labeling what started it, at least one event from each year of the war, and what ended it.

What are they called?

Pixel: Name three types of triangles according to the size of their angles.
Slashdot: Name three types of triangles according to the lengths of their sides.

Related articles

• Reality Gaming: A gateway to the minds of kids who love video games (littleseedsacademy.wordpress.com)
• Critical thinking (slideshare.net)
• What types of action involves involuntary smooth muscles (wiki.answers.com)