My wife Sally and I watched the programme “Who wants to be a millionaire” in which the first million-pound winner, Judith Heppel, appeared. Between us we got all the answers right up to £250,000. I knew the answer to the £500,000 question, “Who is the patron saint of Spain?” (St James), and Sally knew the answer to the million-pound question (she’s great at history). See:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQys_jdB4kA

I also knew the answer to the million-pound question, “A number one followed by 100 zeros is known by what name?” when Major Charles Ingram attempted to defraud the quiz show in September 2001. The possible answers were a googol, a megatron, a gigabit or a nanomole. I knew the answer was googol as I had recently read that Google was a misspelling of googol, which the founders of Google thought would be an appropriate name for their search engine – and I’m not bad at maths anyway.

I couldn’t do it for real, as I would fall to pieces with nerves!

Graham

I love trivial pursuits games, I think they’re also great not only for cultural insights, as you say, but such a nice way to actually learn content.

I hope your cold is easing up a little. Mine is having a whale of a time with my voice…

Thanks for posting the link!

Marisa

I often watch the French and German language versions of the TV programme, however. It’s great for cultural insights.

Here is an online trivia quiz:

http://www.triviala.com/quizzes/view/most-voted

Graham

So much time could be saved if there was a central point where people could find good activities.

Let me know if you start it or if you want me to get it going and then we could invite other people in.

Marisa

It’s a very handy format, too. Once you’ve got your categories set up, you can expand and build over years. I use a game called Word Up, but homemade is always more sophisticated. I’ve always thought game templates should be set up online. Then we could all contribute contents and share. We could have a Wiki devoted to different levels and target groups and plug away.
I’d be happy to contribute.
What do you think?
Anne

Trivia quizzes are great too outside the trivial pursuit game – just single cards for different categories work quite well.

Just to add another point which I forgot to mention in my original post:

When we played the TEFL pursuit game, we quickly realized that using the Trivial Pursuit board tended to waste quite a lot of time, so we discussed ways of covering more questions in less time and we came up with the idea that teams/pairs/groups could challenge each other by asking them ALL the questions on one card and keep score of how many answers they got right.

Great buzz though! And it’s a great way to review all the terminology the DELTA candidates need to know for their Module I examination.

Thanks for taking the time to comment.

Marisa

I like the idea of a simple set of 20+ easy questions for ELLs to understand the basics of the game – then have them make their own cards to play!

We have thousands of trivia questions in our resources of EFL Classroom. Gives me an idea to use them and make a nice set for students to download.

Great idea and I’m sure your students appreciate testing each other and learning through trivia challenges! I use online games for this but this method is great too!

David