Yacapaca

Team working is baked into Yacapaca, and on by default. Yacapaca uses existing student data to produce teams, of whatever size you decide, that are as balanced as possible. This means that even the weakest student has the potential to find him/herself on the winning team.

Here is a pattern that leverages the power of teams.

1. Assign your quiz as a pre-test, with just one attempt allowed. Whilst assigning you can re-organise the teams if needed.
2. Students take the quiz in class or for homework.
3. Use the Teams Whiteboard to show students their team rankings. Explain you are going to run the test again, and offer a small prize for the team that shows the best improvement in results.
4. Give the teams 5-10 minutes to work together. The most savvy will use this time to coach their weakest members, because they have the greatest scope to improve. You may want to nominate Team Captains, and coach them in effective team management.
5. Re-assign the quiz in Exam Mode, making it a purely summative test. Ideally, you have chosen a quiz that selects questions at random from quite a large question bank. This defeats rote learning strategies and pushes students up the Bloom’s hierarchy.
6. Use the Teams Whiteboard again to share the results and discover the winning team.

The big plus of this is the way it motivates your least-engaged students. Instead of fighting your usual lonely battle to find the spark that will ignite their dampened spirits, you effectively recruit their whole team to that cause.

Meanwhile the more able are stretched by having to find common-sense ways to explain content that they themselves take for granted.

And, it’s fun!