Having students compete against one another to solve practice problems is a good way to keep everyone engaged and awake. This could be used as a warm-up or cool down depending on the SI session. The basic premise is to divide the students attending your SI session into equal teams, state or show the practice problem, and have a system for getting points. Here are some ideas for the design:

1. Have students work in groups, the first group to all raise their hands and has the correct answer wins

2. Have students work in groups, have a designated “runner” from each group to run up and high five you before giving the correct answer to get a point.

3. Have one student at a time from each team come up to the board, and whoever writes the correct answer first gets a point

At the end of the set of practice problems, the team with the most points wins. You can have the set of problems available at the session for students to take a picture if they would like to work all the problems out too.

Here is what I wrote in my SI session planner for this activity:

Of course, there are other ways to get creative and personalize this activity, this is just an example in case anyone would like to use it in their session😊

– Beth C. (BIOL 111)