I teach sixth grade science for a majority of my day. However, for ACE (named for our mascot) Period, used as an intervention period for reading and math, I teach math. As a former math teacher, I really enjoy teaching math one period of the day. Last week, I designed a scavenger hunt using QR Codes and our new IPads to spark student motivation for our upcoming math achievement assessment. I used this web-site to design the scavenger hunt. It was VERY easy to use, and created the QR codes for me to print. All I had to do was print them and then "hide" them around the school. Our wonderful tech coordinator downloaded a free QR Code Reader to all of the IPads for me (this would be time consuming if you had to do it yourself, but would only need to be done once). When students scanned the QR code for each question, it took them to the Math Mania Scavenger hunt question for the respective number.
I turned the scavenger hunt into a competition for my students, and split them into pairs. Making it a competition made it really exciting for the students. We didn't finish it the first day, and students were talking about it all afternoon and the following morning. Students loved searching for the codes (some of them were in plain sight and really easy to find, and others were hidden from view and took them quite a while to find). Additionally, students were not allowed to move on to the next question until they had successfully solved the question that they were working on (and I made them explain how they found the answer and show work to prevent cheating). This made the hunt even more exciting, because the lead changed between several different groups over the course of the two days. Students were so focused on the scavenger hunt, that they didn't realize they were working on some very challenging math problems. It was great to see them working/ learning and having fun at the same time
Be sure to check out more great ideas to spark student motivation here:
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