Overall Objective
A homemade PowerPoint game will involve students creatively in studying history. A game based on the World War II event treated in Lost over Burma is used as an example. Students will also learn how to produce their own questions to target different levels of understanding.
Grade Level
Advanced 9–12 and beyond. This unit can be adapted to younger grades and different courses of study in various Canadian provinces and territories.
Content Areas
Social Studies
Materials Required
Access to a computer lab
Internet connection
Microsoft PowerPoint (or other presentation software)
Windows Media Player
Summary
This lesson plan is intended to help students design their own homemade PowerPoint games. Game design is strongly dependent on narrative. Students must research a historical event to find relationships between facts. The historical event becomes an intricate story that must be re-presented in a way that conforms to the interactive nature of a game. PowerPoint provides an excellent vehicle for this kind of game design.
Internet connection
Each film on this site is available for viewing at low speed or high speed.
If you're not sure which speed to use for viewing the films, try high speed first. If the results are not satisfactory, switch to low speed.
Format
Films can be available for viewing in either Macromedia Flash or QuickTime. Image and sound quality are similar for all these formats.
Closed captions (CC)
Translation of the audio portion of a film into subtitles, for example, dialogue, narration, sound effects, etc. These captions let hearing-impaired viewers read what they cannot hear. Closed captions are available for a few films. To access them, you must select QuickTime (under Format) and With closed captions (under Accessibility).
Described video (DV)
A narrated description of a film's key visual elements to enable the vision-impaired to form a mental picture of what is happening on screen. Described video is available for a few films. To access them, you must select QuickTime (under Format) and With described video (under Accessibility).