Some time ago, my boss' husband was at a trade show and won a prize for attending a demonstration. The prize was a classroom set of the quiz show "Jeopardy!". After a bit of thought, he decided to give the set to my hubby-Eric so hubby could use it in a real classroom and get some serious feedback on it. Last night, we set up the set, and with the help of my little sister, we played a couple of two-person rounds.
Now, lest you think this is something small, this is a console that connects to a TV set, and the "answers" appear on the set. There's also a scoreboard which shows the current score and tells which player gets to choose and stuff with some simple lights. Each player gets a wireless remote which they simply need to hit when they have the "question", and the host of the game has another really simple remote that controls the game. We have the basic set, but the catalog says it's expandable up to ten scoreboards, that would be thirty players at the same time! The retail value of the basic set is $400, so we are really impressed that this was donated to hubby-Eric.
Anyway, we tested the game last night, and it was great. The first game was me against my sister, with Eric as the host. The level was for grade-schoolers, so neither of us had any problem coming up with answers. We quickly learned that timing is a large part of winning in Jeopardy. Also, good use of daily doubles helps to get ahead. Although I was convinced that Lisa would beat me, I triumphed in the end by betting nothing on Final Jeopardy. Realizing that I needed to quit while ahead, I took on the host duties for the next game. The host controller only has eight buttons, but you control the whole game from it. It took all of the first round to get the hang of it, but then it became a pretty simple matter. I can see hubby giving a short training session to his fellow teachers, then all of them being able to use this in their classrooms. Anyway, Lisa won the second round thanks to finding Daily Doubles and betting LOTS on them.
The basic set comes with five games, but the cartridge can hold up to twelve. There's also more "canned" games available from the vendor, which Eric is interested in (particularly the Middle School Math one). In addition, the basic set comes with a keyboard that allows you to write your own questions to be stored on a cartridge (and yes, you can get blank cartridges).
After our test run last night, I really would like to see this in action in a classroom. Considering how much fun we had with just two players, it would be interesting to see a bunch of players doing a round robin tournament of some sort. I'm sure once Eric uses it in the classroom he'll blog about it. But my contact with it will probably be limited to just this trial run, so I thought I'd let you all know that this is cool. Now, as a retailer, I've got to figure out how to sell this to PTAs and other groups that want to support teachers (since no teacher is likely to spend $400 on their own, even if the entire staff of the school can use it). It would be a lot of fun to take this around to schools and PTA meetings and show people how cool it is. Maybe someday...
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