Games that are actually useful

My year 8s are a noisy bunch. They're not the most able, and not the most inclined to sitting still or doing worksheets, or questions from the board, or anything much that involved writing. If you can market it as a game, however, their enthusiasm is astonishing. The problem is that most maths games only involve one student at a time - taboo, round-the-world, even fizz-buzz. Bingo is a good solution but doesn't quite have the excitement they're looking for. So I've developed a new way of playing blockbusters so that everyone does every question.

In blockbusters, I display a hexagon grid on the smartboard (from TES), and split the class into two teams. Each team has to make a path across the grid, one from top to bottom and the other from left to right, by picking hexagons and correctly answering the revealed question, which turns the hexagon to their team's colour. Traditionally this is done with one student answering each question. The year 8s love it, but it gets a bit loud and 31/32ths of the class are doing nothing at any one point.

So, one student picks a hexagon. I click on it and when the question appears, there are ten seconds of silence. Any communication forfeits the question. After ten seconds, I pick someone from the team (no hands up allowed - a random name generator would work well here but I just pick). They have to answer the question correctly within 3 seconds. If they don't, I pick someone from the other team, who has 3 seconds, and repeat. If the questions are hard enough, this happens often, so every student in the room is working out the question in the 10 second silence, ready to be called upon.

They love it even more. The pressure is exciting, and there's a huge feeling of not wanting to let down their team, so everyone works it out. It keeps the pace up, and the number of questions each student does in the 5 minutes we play for is huge compared to normal lesson time!