Bingo activity

Duration: 50 minutes
Subject: any subject (the example attached is about Exponential Growth and Decay)

This activity (pdf here) is another way of bringing diversity to drill/textbook exercises. There are many ways of playing bingo in the classroom, but here is how I do it.

(1) Hand out an empty grid to every student.

(2) Project all the answers on the board.

(3) Have students fill up their grid randomly with the answers.

(4) Then project questions one by one. When students solve the questions, they will look at their grid and cross out the box where the answer is. The winner is the first student to get a line, a column, or a diagonal complete. You may want to have a little price for the winner.



Notes:
The setup takes a little long, but it allows students to all have a different grid when the game is played.

As students place the answers in the grid, it is crucial that they are focused and methodical. If not, some students will have an empty box and won't know which answer they missed.

Even though there are 24 squares, you don't need to prepare more than about 12 questions as there will "always" be a student who gets a bingo before that. For each question, I suggest to have the correct answer and a wrong answer. It is an important to add wrong answers that are credible for each question.

Sudoku activity

Time: 60 minutes
Subject: Any math section (the example provided is about Areas under a graph using geometry)

This activity (pdf here) uses a sudoku as an incentive for students to work on drill exercises. Some of the sudoku grid's numbers are substituted with letters. As students solve exercises, they can place the correct number instead of the letter. When they are done with the exercises, they can focus on solving the sudoku.

For instance, this particular activity is entirely based on the study of the following graph:

And the first two questions are: 

Once you find the value of the integrals, you can place those digits (always a whole number between 1 and 9) in the grid.

Mental Math Activity

Duration: 10 minutes
Subject: anything (the example provided is for Integration or polynomials)

This very short in-class activity (pdf here) is designed to be presented to students at the very beginning of the unit on integration. I simply called it "Mental Math" as students won't be allowed to use any material. You can design "Mental Math" games for almost any section of any class. It needs not be Calculus, or even Math. But it applies mostly when questions are short and easy to solve. It is my experience that the students get so focused on keeping the letters memorized that the class turns completely quiet. Here is how it works:

There are 5 basic polynomial integration questions that the teacher will project on a screen. Each of them is a multiple choice. However, teachers shouldn't show the multiple choice answers immediately, as that would enable students to simply differentiate instead of integrating.

Once students have figured out the answer, the teacher will show the multiple choices. As usual, each answer is associated with a letter, but note how the multiple choice letters aren't necessarily A B C D E but may be P L S T R or anything else. Students have to memorize the letter of the answer for each question.

After they have answered the 5 questions, students will have collected 5 letters along the way. To complete the activity, there is a final general question and the answer is an anagram of the 5 letters. It is best when the final question is also related to the material that is being studied.