Theatre Classroom — Technical Theatre Review

January 13th, 2011

A fun review activity before the big test

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and are bearing up over all this weather we’ve been having. It seems no one is immune.  I am currently working on a new book about drama activities for the classroom.  One of my chapters is on Technical Theatre. I divided it into two parts, Technical Terms and Important Areas of Theatre Production. Most of the information dealt with terms and concepts, important information basic drama students should know, and easy subjects for standard testing, but it’s all rather dry. I wanted to give this chapter some kind of fun activity, so I developed the following game to use as a review before the major test.

Jeopardy — Theatre Style

Sometimes instead of an open-ended question and answer review, we played a game loosely based on Jeopardy for extra credit points using answers referring to the technical terms and areas of theatre production.

Each student was responsible for a certain number of words/concepts.  On the review day, they came to class with the definition of the terms/concepts written out on separate pieces of paper.  All the answers were put in a hat. If a student did not come to class prepared, they could not participate.

The class was divided into two teams.  Each team decided in what order each contestant would answer.  Then we decided which team would go first — usually guessing a number I selected and the closest team to that number would start.

Each contestant got only one chance to answer, just like Jeopardy.  You will need a timer that can count seconds as you give each contestant 8 seconds to give “the question.”  If the contestant did not answer or gave an incorrect “question” within the 8 seconds, the “answer” went to the other team.  You keep going until the right “question” is given. The other team then starts with a new “answer.”  A point is awarded to each team that answered correctly.

So what was the incentive?  It could be anything you think is fair.  I chose to give the winning team two wrong answers on the test and not be penalized; the losing team would get one wrong answer.  It was a bit of a pain to correct, but they had a great time learning and remembering the terms — what I had wanted in the first place.  I did not tell them their “prize for winning” until the game was over — to keep suspense!