I wanted to give the opportunity to practice sketching concepts, so we played a home-made version of Pictionary in class. We had four teams of 3-4 students each (this was the Friday before Spring Break, after all). At first I used a ‘medium’ difficulty wordlist from the Game Girl. The artist from each team came up front and I showed them all the same word. Then a minute to think and get ready, and then the teams raced to guess the word. Rules were that the artist could not make any gestures or audible sounds, and could not draw any letters or numbers.

With the medium word list, winners were taking less than 10 seconds for some words. We went to the ‘hard’ list without much difference, and I noticed that all the words were nouns. Then I started making up my own words:

Choose

antagonize

reconcile

reject

mocking

anomoly

sluice

With these, the times were one to three minutes, but ‘sluice’ stumped them. Most students did not know the word. The visual for anomoly was clever; a graph with an outlying data point. In the future an improvement would be to have the winning team display and explain their drawing.

I put up ‘post-modern’, but the artists rejected that, saying they had no idea how to even start, even though they had attended the last lecture where it was defined in a couple of ways, including a cute video. Hmm, I’ll have to think about what to do with this information.