Bracket madness season is upon us and classrooms are a great place to continue the fun while fostering curiosity and reinforcing content. Do you want to expose students to more contemporary authors, female scientists, or African artists? Do you want students to practice math equations or understand how the periodic table is organized? Put it in a tournament bracket and have daily face-offs that students can vote on using the linked information to inform their decision.
My art foundations class loved this last year! My main goal was to expose them to some contemporary artists they may not have heard of but it often led to conversation throughout the class period while they were working on their own art projects or students doing their own, deeper research into a particular artist who appealed to them. Our bracket looked like this one below. Feel free to grab your own copy here.
I’ve since made a generic template that could be used to set up tournament conditions for almost any content.
This bracket is fully customizable by following a few simple steps:
- Insert text or images that represent your content in the outer two columns of the bracket. (Delete or leave-blank the cells or rows you don’t need.)
- Hyperlink your content to websites or other information to make your bracket more interactive.
- Create a Google form to be used as a voting ballot, like this one.
- Link the Form to “Vote Here”.
- To use the same form for each round of voting:
- Unlink the form after the first round of voting.
- Change the voting options on the Google form to reflect the next match-up.
- Re-link the form by selecting “Choose Response Destination” in the “Responses” menu and select, “Choose existing spreadsheet”. (Your existing spreadsheet will automatically add a new tab each time you do this.
- Move your winners and voting link each time a voting round has ended!
If you try this with your students, I’d love to see your examples!
engagEDucate 
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