Quickly Gamify Homework with Khanmigo and Blooket by Cheryl Colan Screenshot of Khanmigo Blooket Generator creating medication dosage questions We've been having fun with a new AI-powered tool available through Khanmigo Te…

 by Cheryl Colan

Screenshot of Khanmigo Blooket Generator creating medication dosage questions

We've been having fun with a new AI-powered tool available through Khanmigo Teacher Tools in the YC Canvas instance: the Khanmigo Blooket Generator. Pictured above, it allows you to generate multiple-choice questions about any topic. Check out this 1-minute video announcement from Khan Academy for a brief overview.

Enabling Khanmigo Teacher Tools

In any Canvas course, you can go to Settings > Navigation and enable Khanmigo Tools. Then scroll to the bottom of the page and Save this change. Now, you can access the Khanmigo Teacher Tools page in your course navigation.

Khanmigo Blooket Generator

You may not see the Blooket generator on the Khanmigo Teacher Tools page in Canvas. If you don't, go to this web address: https://www.khanacademy.org/teacher/khanmigo-tools-canvas

 

Initial prompt screen

To smooth the process of generating a Blooket for your students, go to blooket.com and create a free account before using the Blooket generator. 

When you launch the Blooket generator, you'll configure the AI chatbot prompt that generates your questions. You can add learning objectives, additional notes for your topic, and other instructions. You can keep coming back to this screen to refine your prompt until it provides the type of questions you want your students to use for practice.

Once you start getting good questions, you can preview them and generate as many more as you need. I created 60 medical dosage calculation questions in about 3 minutes, including time spent refining the prompt to include standard units, metric units, and common household measurements.

The Blooket generator only creates multiple-choice questions. It displays them to you on cards (see the screenshot at the top of this page). You can delete individual questions in this preview. 

Assign Homework in Blooket

When you have enough questions, select Export to Blooket at the top of the screen. You will be prompted through the export and end up with your Blooket Question Set ready to assign as homework or host as an in-class competition. 

When you assign homework, you'll get a choice of Game Modes. The game modes work similarly. Students must answer questions correctly to unlock actions in the game. A tutorial on how to play is offered at the start. Students are asked for a name or nickname, so you'll be able to see who has played.

Screenshot of Blooket Game Mode choices

Since you won't know what the different game modes are, here are time-based links to a YouTube video by Blooket walking through some of the homework options (if you start at the first link below, you can view them all):

• Tower Defense and Tower Defense 2
• Monster Brawl
• Tower of Doom
• Factory
• Crazy Kingdom
• Café

You will get a hyperlink and a QR code students can use to join the homework game. Students do not need to create a Blooket account to play. They'll be asked for a nickname at the start, which allows you to see who has played. Consider instructing students to enter their real names if you are giving credit. You could also have them screenshot their final score and submit it for a Canvas assignment. Your Blooket homework page will also display a leaderboard with game progress and statistics about which questions were answered correctly or incorrectly.

Game details

Live Game Modes

There are other games you can offer live in class. For Live Game Modes, the game mechanics include strategy and are designed to keep all students engaged throughout the game, rather than allowing the top few students to dominate. In the Live Game Mode selection, you'll see information about the difficulty level, skills, ideal number of players, and ideal game-play time, so you will have an idea of how long it will take as a group activity. The playing times range from 5 to 10 minutes, and the longest ideal playing time is 10 minutes. Live games run as a competition. You could consider having teams of students play as a group. Each group or player should have their own device. The games work well on mobile phone web browsers, tablets, and laptops.

Whether offering as homework or playing live in class, you can share this 1-minute How to Join a Blooket Game video to help students get started.

I had a blast playing the Café game in homework mode. I was just trying to understand how the games work in order to write this article, but I felt challenged to complete my game and I played for about 15 minutes instead of spending only 5 minutes as I had planned.

To sum up the homework gamification process:

• Enable Khanmigo Teacher Tools in any Canvas course
• Create a free Blooket account
• Use Khanmigo Blooket Generator and leverage AI to quickly generate a question bank on any topic
• Export to Blooket
• When ready, assign a game as homework (2-minute video tutorial)
• Review your game's homework results once students have played (1.5-minute video tutorial)
• Use the results to assess where your students might need a little more support or review

If you try this out, we would love to hear your feedback. How well did it work for you? How did your students like it? Leave us a comment with your thoughts!