GimKit! An amazing interactive game

So evidently one of my awesome teacher friends (of the Medieval Bestiary Unit fame!) found GimKit and told me about it last week.  I maintain that I was gone during that part of the conversation, but we discussed it again Tuesday afternoon, used it Wednesday morning and had students acting like I had been holding out on them!  It was that good.  And I am also pretty much as obsessed as my students!  (And it was made by students and run by students which makes it that much cooler!)  Pardon my overuse of exclamation marks, but it really is that exciting.

It is an interactive quiz game similar (but better!) than Kahoot and Quizizz (and I will even say Quizlet Live!)  You can easily import your Quizlet sets into GimKit.  Then, you can set up the objective.  I LOVE how much you can personalize this part.  (Although I haven’t tried all of them because I wanted to get this post out to you so you can try it!)  Here are some of the settings:

• You can have students work individually or in teams.
• You can also set up how many players you have per team.
• You can come up with a game goal.  You can have students race to earn enough money during a set time limit (that you create).  You can set a goal of money that all teams have to reach to finish the game.  You can also set the goal as a race that students are trying to reach in order to win.  Or you can do all in, where all of the teams race to earn a total money goal.

I will say that to experiment with my class, I started with a target of 1 million dollars in team mode.  They all reached it in about 30 minutes.  I am sure they would go faster in the future, but we were both figuring it out.

Then, they also have some of the regular settings from most games.

Then the fun starts when you create a game!  Students join without an account by putting in the code into their computers.  I would use just laptops as one student had difficulty with his phone.

As students answer multiple choice questions based on the Quizlet set, they earn money for answering questions correctly and lose money for answering incorrectly.  Their money all goes into the same pot for the team mode, but the amazing thing is that they are ALL answering questions at their own pace.  They aren’t waiting for others to answer.  Also, if they answer questions correctly, they just get more questions.  They don’t feel the pressure to answer based on speed.  As individuals or teams earn more money, they can spend it on different things to help them earn more money.  Then students can try to buy more perks.  They can buy:

• More money per question
• Streak bonus (to earn more money after you answer two questions correctly)
• Multiplier (every dollar in OR OUT gets multiplied!)
• Insurance (you only pay out a certain amount when you get a question incorrect)

The fun part is that if they are in teams, they can use their total winnings to buy these perks.  So sometimes one student will buy something without consulting his or her team. 🙂

Overall, my students felt like they were really remembering these words well because it was going to quickly.  Also, the analytics after it are amazing!  Check out this list that I got after my first game based on the words in El Ekeko:

I also can see individual student progress:

I encourage you to try it!  You can only create 3 kits to store with the free version, but I think your students will love it.  My students and others have also commented that they felt like they were really learning the words.