Hello all, Chris here. Today I have something pretty exciting to share! Recently I designed an activity which I called the Amazing Race based off of the television show with the same name. For more information on the show please check here:
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/amazing_race/
This activity replaced the usual oral exam in the fourth semester German courses. Inspiration for the activity came after watching a recent episode of the show where the contestants were actually in Hamburg, Germany. As Hamburg is one of the chapters in our textbook, I began to think of how the television show could be adopted to a campus setting.
I designed the activity to take place within a limited area on the Purdue campus as doing the activity without set borders would likely lead teams to go hunting for clues in too wide an area. The main issue when designing the activity was how to make it all fit within a 50 minute class period as well as the fact that we would need to do this activity for all three courses within our section. I settled on doing the activity during each class' normal meeting time to avoid having to deal with scheduling a large number of people outside of regular meeting times. Thus, we would do the activity a total of three times. Fortunately, all of our classes were back-to-back and so we were able to finish the oral exam for all three section in a mere three hours.
Students formed groups of 4-5 in each class. There were four stations for the activity, each themed according to one of the chapters in our textbook. The stations used were Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, and Leipzig. At each station students would choose between two different types of activities which would test their language abilities. The students would also receive an evaluation at each station and thus at the end each group and each student would have a total of four evaluations which would form their grade.
To add a more competitive element for the students, I contacted the
Goethe-Insitut in Chicago who graciously supplied a host of prizes such as t-shirts, coffee mugs, pencils, stickers, etc. These would be awarded to the groups who had the highest scores for the event (grade - time elapsed = final score). Thus, it was important for groups to finish quickly but actual performance quality was still the most important factor. Groups who took longer than the 50 minutes of course time would receive a time penalty.
I will not go into specific details of the event and its activities here as I am currently working on an article for publication for this. Look for a fully-detailed account in a future issue of
Die Unterrichtspraxis.
Questions and comments welcome! Enjoy the pictures from the event below!
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