Review Games Shouldn’t Need a $4 PowerPoint
Search for a whack-a-mole review game and you mostly find paid PowerPoint templates — files you download, edit slide by slide, and that only run on a desktop with Office installed. This is the other way: paste your questions, press Start, and the game is live on whatever screen your classroom already has. Moles pop out of nine holes carrying answers; the class whacks the right one before it ducks and re-pops somewhere else. That re-popping matters — students can’t hunt for a highlighted box, they have to actually know which answer is right while the board keeps moving.
How Teachers Run It
The quickest version: project the game, read each question aloud, and let a volunteer whack while the class shouts directions. For review-day energy, switch to team mode — 2 to 4 teams take turns, a correct whack banks 100 points, and whacking a wrong mole hands the turn to the next team. The speed setting is the difficulty dial: Relaxed leaves moles up six full seconds for early readers, Frantic is a two-second-per-mole playoff for facts they claim they know cold. Question sets save in your browser with a name, so “Unit 7 vocab” is one click away next week — and the same saved set works in the plinko review game, so the same list powers two different game days. Keep score across rounds on the classroom scoreboard, or pick teams fairly first with the random team picker.
Write Questions in Seconds
One line per question: What is 7 × 8? = 56. Wrong answers fill in automatically from your other questions’ answers — the classic flashcard trick, which keeps distractors plausible because they come from the same topic. When you want specific wrong answers (common misconceptions are gold here), use question | correct | wrong | wrong. Starter packs below get a game running in one click while you decide.