Skip to main content

Gamify Art History!

Gamifying my classroom has been absolutely amazing. Giving students different learning targets and resources then allowing them to pick the skills to target each day has made class more fun and engaging not only for the kids but for me too. I wanted to bring that spirit and enthusiasm to art history, so I decided this year, I will end the school year with an NCAA style tournament. I created brackets with 32 different artists. I just listed 32 artists in a spreadsheet then hit "randomize range" and got 16 completely random matchups. Of course, I couldn't resist a few tweaks so Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is in the same bracket as Romero Britto's Mona Cat. I also put Lee Krasner up against Jackson Pollock in round 1. Other than that though, it was completely random. Apparently, Google is a willing accomplice in my playful matchups, as the random sort did put Lichtenstein against Monet allowing me to put different versions of water lilies head to head.

Here are my brackets for "Arts Madness"

After selecting all the artists/work for the matchups, I had to create the forms. I decided that it would help students get invested in the tournament if there were a prize for correctly predicting the outcome. I don't have time to have 550 students fill out brackets, so I made a simple Google form asking just for the student's full name, grade level, which they think will win and why. Since part of my goal is to get students critically analyzing works, I am rewarding the best arguments in favor of a particular artwork. At the end of the tournament, when I announce the winning art, I will look at the predictions students made. I will pick one winner from each grade level to get a custom printed t-shirt. The winners will be chosen based on who had the strongest explanation for why their predicted piece would win.

After setting the brackets, I made a form for the first round match ups. I decided it would be best for students to just vote on one matchup each week. I thought if I had every student weigh in on 16 matchups, it would become too cumbersome and too many would pick without giving it any real thought (sort of testing fatigue). I made 16 copies of the form and put different works in each copy. Then I made a QR code for each form so students can scan the QR code and weigh in on just one matchup then go about their day. Next week, I'll share the winners by displaying the bracket and have 8 forms for the round 2 matchups. Week 3 will be just four matchups, week 4 will be two matchups (our Final Four). Week five will be our championship and everyone in the school will vote on that final matchup. That will coincide perfectly so that week 6 (my final week of school) I can announce the winning art and give students their shirts at the awards ceremony we have at the end of every school year.

I'm super excited to start this new game and hopefully, it will get students hooked on evaluating and critiquing art.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weaving with Monotypes

I have been doing a lot of clay and other messy projects lately, so I thought what better than printmaking to get my tables clean at the end of the day. I started by teaching my first graders a little bit about suminagashi, the Japanese paper marbling technique. Suminagashi translates to floating ink and it can create wonderful, vibrant marbled papers. While this was a great inspiration for our process, it wasn't a technique I believed the average first grade student could master. I also took inspiration from Helen Frankenthaler's "soak and stain" method of abstract expressionism. For this project, students started by making monotypes. I sprayed all the tables, and students painted in the puddles, then they pressed their papers to the paint. Essentially they were using the tables like giant stamps. The result was wonderful prints that seemed somewhat marbled, and somewhat like color field paintings. Each student made three prints this past week. One print was made up ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Painted and Printed Pumpkins

This is a video I made to teach my elementary students how to make a painting of a pumpkin. What I love about this demo is painting a pumpkin helps to show kids how to blend colors and use value to make something look round but it also shows kids how repeating curved lines will create the illusion that they are wrapped around a curved form. This helps lay a little bit of a foundation to be used later when teaching linear perspective and for Op Art. For the background, I have students print using found objects as stamps. This can help to create a nice Pop Art type of feel particularly when kids add facial features. I encourage them to use cut shapes to create emoji type faces so they are practicing their cutting and gluing skills as well as making the composition a little more more expressive and unique. I did this with young students and it worked well to break up the activities. First, they painted just a circle focusing on creating a gradient. Next, they set that aside and printed...
Post a Comment
Read more

Who ARTed - New Podcast Coming!

Since the new(ish) National Core Arts Standards were adopted,  I have been giving a lot of thought to how I can get kids engaged in connecting and responding to art. While I love art history, it can be difficult to carry on a sustained conversation with the class. A number of students find history interesting, but a much more significant number of my students will join in a class discussion by asking "can we make art now?" Since I switched to format of my class to what I refer to as a "Gamified TAB" classroom, students have been happy and engaged in creating all sorts of different projects. Students pick their projects and earn their marker badge, clay badge, printmaking badge etc. The problem is in my initial rollout, almost everything was centered on the creation aspect of art. Now I am creating new badges for investigation, presentation etc. I created a comfy corner in my classroom where students can read and relax because exploring art history is a perfectly...
Post a Comment
Read more