About 7-8 years ago, I became frustrated with the results of some of my course evaluations. More specifically, I was frustrated with the ways students were assessing their intellectual growth after taking my classes. For instance, they were asked how much they knew about intersectionality before taking my course and after on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 representing the least amount of knowledge they had about the subject and 5 representing the most. Surprisingly (at least to me at the time), several students would indicate that their knowledge about intersectionality was at a 4 before taking my course and a 5 after when in reality, they should have been marking their knowledge about the subject at no more than a 2.

It became important for me, then, to develop a way of allowing me and them to more accurately assess their knowledge at the start of class. At first, I developed a first-day exam for my Feminist Theory course (the one I struggled the most with in terms of the aforementioned issue). However, I realized that didn’t really suit my pedagogical style. While I wholeheartedly reject the label of “edutainer,” I do like to keep my teaching (and assignments) creative, collaborative, and captivating whenever appropriate and necessary. Hence, first-day Jeopardy was born, and my students now play three rounds at the start of all my classes no matter the subject matter or numerical level. Take a peak at the one I developed for FG212/RM200/FM205 Critical Media Studies:

Cool, huh?

I feel compelled to note that I’m not inclined to post any of my Jeopardy games in their entirety on the web, because each game takes between 30-40 hours to create and revise, and I am very protective of how much of my intellectual labor I distribute without compensation. However, if you’re interested in learning how to create your own game or in having me do it for you (much easier for you, right?), please contact me using this form: