Many people know Free Rice as a vocabulary-building program with a humanitarian bent: every time you get a question right, you donate 20 grains of rice to the World Food Programme. Now, however, Free Rice covers a host of subjects: grammar, math, geography, and, my most recent discovery, fine art.
You are given a famous painting and are asked (via a multiple-choice question) to identify the painter. Now, this may not be much of a game, per se, but I had to do a similar sort of assignment for a high school humanities class, and memorizing a huge number of famous painting and painters has proved remarkably useful to me.
One of the easiest ways to incorporate games into teaching is to use Jeopardy. I have used it to liven up test reviews in courses as disparate as calculus and remedial arithmetic. Free templates for the game can be gotten by searching “PowerPoint Jeopardy Template.” You can then enter questions and answers into the template. There are also versions available that teachers have posted for various classes, with the questions and answers already written in.
To make game play more collaborative, and to ensure that everyone is working, the whole class can participate in finding the answer to each question, rather than just one student at a time, or the class can be split into teams. Student appreciate being able to go back over the game at home as further review, which can be facilitated by posting the game online, for example, in a course management system such as Blackboard.
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