Three Ways to Quickly Create Your Own Educational Games
The Internet is not lacking for websites that offer online games for students. Even so, there are still occasions when you can’t find exactly what you or your students need. In those cases it can be easier to create your own game instead of conducting more fruitless searches. Here are three tools that I regularly recommend to quickly create your own educational games.
TinyTap
TinyTap is a tool that you can use on your iPad, your Android tablet, or in your web browser to create your own educational games for elementary school students. To create your own educational game on TinyTap simply head to TinyTap.com and click “create.” From there you’ll see a menu of six game types to create. You can then watch tutorials on game design or simply jump into creating a game. All games are created in a slide-by-slide basis. Within each slide you can add pictures, text, and audio prompts. You can choose how your students interact with questions and prompts in your game. They can interact by tapping, clicking, circling objects, matching objects, typing, or speaking. Here’s a short tutorial on making a shape puzzle game on TinyTap.
Flippity
Long-time readers probably know that I’m a big fan of using Flippity to create educational games through Google Sheets. Flippity also has an option to create games without using Google Sheets. That option is called, “quick and easy” and it lets you do almost all of the same things as creating a game with Google Sheets.
With Flippity you can create things like a snowman word game and a digital board game. Flippity’s Snowman word game is a game in which students have to correctly guess the letters of a word in order to prevent their snowmen from melting. The template lets you make your own variation on the game with words and hints of your choosing. Your game can be shared with students via its assigned URL. Students don’t need accounts in order to play the games that you create. Here’s an overview of how to create your own online word games by using Flippity’s Snowman template.
With Flippity’s board game template you can create a game that includes up to eight players, has up to three dice to roll, and interactive game squares. You game can also include videos, pictures, Google Drawings, and graphs. And your students can play your game without an email address or having to create any kind of online account. Take a look at my short video to see how you can create and play your own online board game.
Educandy
Educandy is a good service for creating simple vocabulary games and multiple choice trivia games. A convenient aspect of the service is that once you’ve created a list of vocabulary words it will automatically be applied to multiple game formats for you. In other words, write one word list and you’ll get three games that your students can play. Your students can play the games without needing to create an account on the Educandy site. In this video I provide an overview of how you can create games on Educandy and how your students can access your games.