Designing Your Own Educational Board Game

With a little time and effort, you can design classroom activities which are fun and educational. Creating your own educational board game is not difficult, and it doesnt cost very much. And it will be well worth the effort when you see your students engaged and enthusiastic about learning, when they think theyre just playing.

The easiest educational board game to create is bingo. Bingo can be used for just about any subject you can think of. All you need is paper. Create bingo charts for your students which contain grids. Ideally grids should be about 5 squares by 5 squares. Then, of course, youll need bits of paper which youll draw and call out. Only, instead of calling out numbers and letters, in this educational version, youll call out something related to the curriculum. For example, if the students are learning phonics, youll call out words which use the phonics principles youre studying. Or if you want to create an educational science game, you might call out questions about biology. The students will check their bingo boards to see if they have the correct answers.

Another very easy way to create a fun classroom game is to use an old trivial pursuit game and make up your own questions and categories. Regular trivial pursuit has several categories organized by color; all you have to do is make up your own categories and match each one to a color. For example, if you want to create an educational board game specifically for math, your categories could be fractions, operations, algebra, graphs, etc. Or, you could make a cross-curricular educational board game, with categories like math, science, social studies, English, and art. Then, of course, you must come up with questions and answers for each category and lots of them. The nice thing about this board game is that you already have all the component parts. You just need to make up the questions.

Of course you can always be more creative and construct your own educational board game from scratch. Take a large piece of poster board and create a game board with consecutive squares. Have students roll a pair of dice, and move the requisite number of squares just like in Monopoly. On each square, students will find different instructions on where to move or what to do next. You can incorporate trivia cards with subject-area related questions. Be as imaginative as you like. In fact, if you have advanced students, have them make up their own educational board game. You might be amazed at what they come up with!