Friday, January 8, 2016

Guest Post: QuizUp

Today's Guest Post is by Michael Sandler or Arlington High School in the great state of Massachusetts. Michael recently posted during #psychat his exploration of using the app "QuizUp" for AP Psychology studying. 

Here is his idea, in his own words. Thanks, Michael, for contributing!


If your students are like mine, they’re on their phones whenever they can – and sometimes should – be. I’ll admit it: the same applies to me. When I have a moment, I like to play games, especially against friends; so do many of my students.


QuizUp is an app I’ve been playing for a few years. It allows players to face off in head-to-head trivia matches about a wide variety of topics. Recently, the game’s producer (Plain Vanilla Games, from Iceland, of all places) unveiled the opportunity for users to create original quiz categories. There has been a Psychology category for years – the questions tend to center around clinical psych – but I wanted to make a study tool tailored to my classes’ curriculum.


After my students read the chapter we’re studying, they have to create original multiple-choice questions about the unit. They use this Google form which populates a spreadsheet. From there, it’s copy-and-paste to put the questions into whatever quizzing tool I prefer: Socrative, Kahoot, Quizziz, and now QuizUp. The metacognitive act of creating questions is an ideal study method.

I encourage you to send your students to QuizUp’s web site or app and search for “AP Psychology.” My students use Myers for AP, ed. 1 and they wrote all of the questions. (But I vetted them, so no junk!) There are presently questions for Chapters 1-3, 5-8, and 10, but I will be adding more as the year progresses. I’d love to see some unfamiliar names on the leaderboard!

---Posted by Amy Ramponi

2 comments:

  1. this is an excellent idea! thank you for sharing

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  2. Love this idea, so fantastic! I know students have enjoyed Quizlet and the learning games that you can have there. (On a side note, tell your kids to dictate their vocab definitions into Quizlet. I always hear complaining about typing in their vocab. words, but they enjoy it way more now that they can say it aloud on their iPhones.) Anyways, I'm loving QuizUp because it seems like it emphasizes the gaming aspect, and the students love to get competitive with things like this! Thank you for sharing!

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