September 4, 2013

QR Code guessing game




I prepared a qrcode game activity for my Upper Intermediate students last week which I'd like to share with you. Our last lesson had the theme "Hidden Messages". We discussed several ways people used to hide messages in the past and nowadays, including the use of QR codes.

The lesson grammar topic was language to express different levels of certainty. As a warmer for the following class, I decided to create an activity which involved sentences using the language learned recently, and QR codes.


 THE GAME:

-  First, I had asked students to download a QR code scanner to their mobiles at home so after checking how many students had remembered to do that (only 3), I divided the class into 3 groups.
- They had to read the sentences and try to guess the ending of the sentences and write them on paper.
- Then, they would use a cell phone to scan the code and see if they had guessed the idea of the original sentence. They would get 1 point for each correct guess.
The activity worked well. Students were involved trying to guess the sentences and I saw some enthusiasm during the time they scanned the codes for the right answer. Now, could I have done the same thing simply giving them the answers on a separate sheet of paper? Of course, I could, but using the QR CODES to hide the rest of the sentence made a lot of sense because of the topic of the lesson and it also avoided some cheating.

What would I have done differently? 

- Maybe I would have asked different groups to check each other answers.
- Or I would have asked students to create their own sentences one class and done the same activity with the codes but this time with their sentences.

The idea of guessing the ending of sentence can be done with any kind of content, I guess.

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