#CYOA – Infinitely Teaching

Choose Your Own Adventure, Geometry, Google Forms, Solving Equations

Choose Your Own Adventure Updated

June 22, 2018 Mandi

A lesson is only as good as the updates you make. This activity, which I first blogged about here and here, came from Ditch That Textbook by Matt Miller. I love this idea and now use it as an alternative assessment activity. Please go back and read how this started for me.

One reason I love this activity so much is because it gives students choice and freedom of topic, they become the teacher so they learn the content more deeply, they peer edit which is a very crucial skill, and this year I added a Flipgrid component in collaboration with another school.

I have updated my planning documents a little. They are posted on the posts, but this will be the most up-to-date document I have. I have also created a Google Slide presentation so very little teacher direction is needed. Another update I made this year was to increase the level of peer editing. Students do not intuitively know how to do this, so I updated the document so they have a little more guidance. Lastly, and probably the most exciting part for me, was creating these CYOA stories for a sister class in another district. We sent them our completed stories and then each student left feedback via Flipgrid. We’ve sent our stories to this district before but having video Feedback through Flipgrid was amazing and meant a lot more for my students.

I’ve included some fun examples from this year. I encouraged my Geometry students to create circular images as part of the story. You can check the links above for examples from previous years including some Algebra 1 examples.

Including the Flipgrid responses from our sister school was an amazing addition. My students loved seeing the faces and hearing their reviewers. It also made the audience “authentic” to them. We did get permission from their parents for my students to view them but we did not include releasing it publically so I can’t share the link to the grid. I’ve included a screenshot of the grid below.

Screen Shot 2018-06-22 at 8.10.36 PM

You can find a link to my resources below.

Planning Guide – 2018 CYOA Scoring Guide-Algebra

2018 Choose Your Own Adventure Planning Guide-Geometry

Slide Presentation –

Student Peer Review Document – 2018 CYOA Scoring Guide-Algebra

2018 CYOA Scoring Guide-Geometry

Here is an example of a peer review. In my experience, you need to model this for your students. I have, in the past, peer-edited my own story with the class so they see what to look for.

Screen Shot 2018-06-22 at 8.20.25 PM

Please give credit to Matt Miller and me if you use this idea. It has been a fabulous learning experience in my classroom and I look forward to the next update!

Chromebook, Geometry, Google Drawing, Google Forms, performance task, technology

CYOA Geometry Style

May 24, 2016 Mandi

Choose Your Own Adventure was such a success in Algebra that we wanted to try it in Geometry. This served as our unit 7 assessment. We followed the same process that we did here but I did update the process so students could plan electronically using this planning form. I also had students create this in New Forms so the process is slightly different than my original post.

The biggest difference between old Forms and new Forms is inserting a page compared to new section.

Untitled drawing (4)

We also used Google Drawing so students could create their geometry problems using tangents, secants, arcs & chords. Many students had never used Google Drawing and they were very excited how nice their images looked.

Two Tangents

Students had to get 3 peer reviews, which meant a student worked through their adventure, correct and incorrect answers, then gave feedback on improvements. They used this document to guide them through the peer reviews. The result SHOULD have been a product that met all of the requirements. Some students don’t peer edit as well as other but they learned quickly that being NICE doesn’t help you improve.

Here are a few of my favorite projects. I told them I wouldn’t publish them unless they were correct. 🙂

Journey to Pasta

Royals Rally

First Day of School

Making it to the Movies

Google Forms, PBL, Solving Equations

Choose Your Own Adventure Project with Google Forms

September 20, 2015April 22, 2020 Mandi

You know when you find a project and you think, “This could be a fun project that my students could benefit from”, and then you get the results from your students and it was a flop? Well this isn’t that type of project. I was blown away by some of the stories my students created. I don’t have all of them listed below because they have to correct their mistakes before I will publish them, but they can keep correcting until it’s ready for the public eye. Check back, I’ll add more as they become available.

I can’t take all the credit for this project. The original idea came from @jmattmiller in his book Ditch That Textbook. I did make the scoring guide and the planning sheet to help students create this. Matt also has a video on his site that would be a good resource also.

Now Matt teaches Spanish and I teach Math, but the basic idea of Choose Your Own Adventure is present and could be adapted for any content area. My students had to have 5 equations, a good story line, images, & explanations of misconceptions if a player choose the wrong answer. We started by writing the story on the planning pages. It’s a lot easer to type this into Google Forms if you already have your story and equations in place on the planning page. I also included instructions about how to enter the information into forms on the back of the planning pages.

My scoring guide is based on our SBL. Our non-math standards include Quality of Work, Completeness of Work and Timeliness, basic skills an employer would want. We also assess based on our Math standards from our curriculum. You may take my scoring guide and adjust it to fit your curriculum.

I have the Docs set up to make a copy when you click on them.

Planning Page

Scoring Guide

Now for some awesomeness. (Disclaimer – some didn’t follow copyright and snagged images from Google. We did talk about this but some chose the easier path)

Journey to Be A Mage (all images drawn by student)

Treasure Map (in the Spirit of TLAP – @burgessdave would love this one)