Restless students in need of some fun learning? Have some fun with review activities! While end of unit or even lesson reviews are vital and often needed to accelerate learning or make up for learning gaps, they can fun and productive.

These low-prep classroom review games will not only improve your students’ knowledge retention but also bring a new level of excitement to your classroom. So get ready to turn any dull revision session into a fun and productive learning experience with these creative classroom games and activities!

1. Around the World

Around the World is a classic game that I’ve seen used time and time again with great success! It’s perfect for individual play, and limited time because all you need is a list of questions, and you can leave your students in their seats (to begin with).

How: You start by having two students stand up and pair off against each other. Then, you ask a question and whoever shouts the answer first wins. The winner then moves on to the next desk for the next contestant, and so on and so forth. The student who didn’t win, sits down in the desk where they are, even if it’s not theirs! The goal is to move as many seats as possible before losing. Once you lose, you sit in the seat of the person who bested you. The game ends when one student makes it “around the world” and gets all the way back to their own seat, or when the time is up -the person who traveled the farthest wins.

Materials: just questions!

2. Multiple Choice Quiz Game

Turn your material or assessment questions into a quiz game to have your students practice, learn, and have fun while doing it!

How: Option 1: ClassPoint. As a PowerPoint user, ClassPoint is my go-to! It’s a PowerPoint add-in that let’s you turn your slide into a student activity posing a question that they can answer from their device! Write your question on your slide (one question per slide!), then add the Multiple Choice button, and invite your students to join online! Gamify it by awarding stars for correct answers, and revealing the leaderboard to showcase the standings after each question!

Option 2 & 3: Kahoot! and Quizizz are other great alternatives if you don’t use PowerPoint. Go online to their website, create an account, create your quiz, and invite your students to play! Kahoot has a library of existing quizzes if your material is universal too.

Materials: ClassPoint, Kahoot!, or Quizizz are all great options

More on ClassPoint’s Quiz mode:

I also use ClassPoint for this game because they have an option to turn multiple choice questions to quiz mode where you can set the difficulty levels to 1–3 stars. Additionally (and brilliantly), you can get a quiz summary excel report with all the answers and performance by student & question as a sneaky yet super helpful formative assessment.

Let ClassPoint write the questions for you:

The best think about ClassPoint too, is their new AI quiz writer! So, if you already have a deck full of information, let ClassPoint read your slides, and come up with questions for you, so you don’t have to!

3. Fill In The Blanks

Similar to a practice for students, but you can turn a simple fill in the blank review activity into a game by using gamification system of ClassPoint as well. Since they have a combination of features supporting teachers to reward students with levels and leaderboard, it surely is not a boring review exercise but a fun one!

How: Add your questions or phrases including blanks to your slides in PowerPoint! You can leave a max of 5 blanks per slide. Add the Fill in the Blanks button, then run it with your class in presentation mode! They can use their device to fill in the blanks and submit back for you to review and reveal the correct answer!

Gamify it by giving stars for correct answers! And let students pitch their answer variation for a correct star!

Materials:

• Microsoft PowerPoint
• ClassPoint add-in

4. Fly Swatter

Need to practice vocabulary? An easy and tech free way is to play fly swatter with vocab words written at the board!

How: Write a spread out cloud of vocab words on the board, and divide the class into two teams. Have one student from each team come up the board and turn their back to the board, give them a fly swatter. Read out the definition of the word, then the students will race to turn around, find the correct vocab word, and touch it with the fly swatter. Whoever swats the correct word first get’s a point for their team!

Materials:

• 2 fly swatters
• whiteboard
• list of vocab words & definitions

5. Crossword Puzzle

Has anyone spent hours to solve a crossword puzzle? If you have then welcome to the team, because you’re one of 50 million people who consider crossword as part of their daily life. In fact, according to Griffith University, crossword puzzle is an intellectual activity that teachers should implement in classroom activities because it could provide an opportunity for students to evaluate their knowledge and help them to pay more attention to the lesson.

Which is why, sometimes, I would create crossword puzzle as a review game for students at the end of the lesson to help them on recalling their lesson easier!

How: Designing a crossword puzzle is surely time-consuming, so I found a smarter and faster way to do it — online! You just need to provide the tool a list of words that you want to put in the game and it will auto generate the crossword puzzle for you. Then, download the worksheet and the answer sheet, print out copies, and give it to your students! If you want to make it a digital classroom game, copy and paste it to your PowerPoint slide, then use ClassPoint’s slide drawing to send it to your student’s devices!

Materials:

• Crossword generator: There are many online crossword puzzle makers such as My Crossword Maker and Crossword Labs, but after a few tries, my favorite crossword maker is Crossword Puzzle — Worksheet Generator.
• Copy printer or ClassPoint or other similar interactive activity tool such as Nearpod

6. Group Work Contest

Use the power of group work collaboration combined with game-play competition for a fun and effective review game!

How: Divide the class into 2 to 4 different groups, and Then, pose a series of questions or challenges that a group must achieve in a set amount of time in order to win points. Set the time to be somewhat limiting to increase the challenge and practice time-constrained thinking & recalling. Once the time is up, the group with the most correct answers wins! Make this more competitive by adding multiple rounds and a scoreboard to keep track of points earned in each round! You can make a digital scoreboard using ClassPoint as well. That way, your students can be awarded as a group and they will be encouraged to actively interact and participate in group activity.

Materials:

• an assignment you can turn into a competition game
• a timer
• optional: a digital scoreboard!

Group activity is truly essential and effective when it comes to review game. By allowing students to work in a group of peers, they can help each other to learn faster and understand the knowledge easier. Furthermore, according to University of New South Wales, group work motivates students to improve their skills and to expose individual diverse ideas and approach. Thus, as teachers we can also take advantage of these benefits to host group activity and support students in group games.

7. Headbands

Have you ever played the popular mobile game Headband? The first player — player A — will receive a note card with a word, and without looking at this word, they must place it on his or her forehead. Then the other player — player B — will need to describe the word without directly mentioning the answer. In the digital game, player A tries to guess as many words as possible before their time is up! This is super fun, and can be easily turned into classroom review games!

How: When played as a classroom game, 1 student plays the role as player A, and the rest of the class will be player B. Using index cards or sticky notes, write vocab words or course concepts that you want to review. Without looking, player A holds up one note card on their forehead revealing it to the class. The classmates must describe the concept or the definition without using the written word to player A, while they try to guess it! To gamify it, you can set a 2 min timer for each player, and see how many cards they can go through. Or, make it a relay and set a 5 min timer, switching player A after each word and seeing how many students they can get through. There are many ways you can play around with these from individual player points to setting teams!

By doing this, we can motivate our students to describe and talk about the knowledge that they learned in the lesson on their own. This is actually a trick of using the Feynman Technique — a popular study technique — in our classroom.

Materials:

• vocabulary words
• index cards, sticky notes, or paper!

8. Team Trivia Race at the Board

Who doesn’t love a gameshow-like game?! But instead of the time consuming prep of jeopardy, just take a list of assessment questions, add a scoreboard, and wha lah, you have a trivia game!

How: Divide the class into 2 teams, and have the students form two lines starting at the board. Ask the first two students a question, whoever answers first get’s a point for their team. If teams are even, keep each student for two questions and alternate who leaves to mix up the pairings. If both students get it wrong, anyone get’s to guess for a team point to keep the rest of the students involved. Set a timer, and the team with the most points in the end wins! Make it fun with speed and by trying to get through as many questions as quickly as possible!

Materials:

• questions
• whiteboard
• timer

9. Independent Trivia Race

Similar to the last game, you can do an independent trivia race at the board (or even in their seats!) by asking a group of students a question and giving whoever get’s it right first a point!

How: Randomly select 2 to 5 students, have them come up (or stand up at their desk) to answer your question. Give out points to whoever gets it right first or whoever can get it right if its challenging!

To randomly select names, use the wheel spinner & name picker in PowerPoint! Add your class list and draw multiple names at once with the auto-pick! It’s that easy, and the names will be left out so everyone is sure to get a turn before you reshuffle!

Materials:

• questions
• name picker
• optional: timer

leaderboard or candy- To make it a game or reward, you can use a class leaderboard to give points to individual students or you can give out pieces of candy. If you use PowerPoint, ClassPoint has a gamified leaderboard that you can add your class list to, and give out stars for whatever you choose!

10. Drag and Match

An easy drag and drop classroom game of matching the knowledge description with the definition or the keyword of concept. While your students figure out the description and definition that they need to match, they also get to review their lesson through the game.

How: Prepare a slide with drag and drop elements of description on one side, and on the other side of the slide, prepare fixed definition or keywords of concept. Then, students will need to match the description with the definition of the knowledge they learned. They can drag and drop the elements of description to where it belongs, or can also draw on the slide to connect the factors.

Materials:

• ClassPoint’s add-in
• Draggable objects
• Alternatively, you can prepare this as a Slide Drawing activity and allow students to match the keywords by drawing the connection on their device

Conclusion

All the classroom game ideas above are very easy to adopt in your classroom. After long session of lecture, there’s no harm to help yourself and your students to relax a little bit while still revising the knowledge with review games. Nevertheless, if you don’t have the time to prepare all the review questions for your lesson, then an AI quiz generator might be something you need.

One of my favorite tools so far is ClassPoint AI. I have been using ClassPoint for a while to help me in creating interactive questions and activities in PowerPoint for my students, but their recent released feature is definitely leveling up the whole ed-tech game. All I need to do now is preparing lecture slides in PowerPoint. After every lesson, in presentation mode, I will go to the lecture slides, give my students 5 minutes to review everything, then turn on ClassPoint AI feature to generate some questions from the lecture notes. It is so quick and easy, and because the add-in auto creates question using Bloom Taxonomy, the questions generated by AI met my expectation just right. Moreover, it provides three diverse types of question include MCQ, short answer and fill in the blanks. This tool is absolutely a must-try!

Lastly, don’t forget to share your creative ideas or favorite review games as well in the comment section so we can also learn from each other!