20.9  YES / NO GAME

I showed a list of all the names of pupils present on the screen. One pupil sat in front of the class and thought of one pupil in the class.  The others had to find out who the pupil had chosen. They had to ask YES / NO questions, eg, ‘Is the person a girl?’

This was group work, and the idea was to find out as quickly as possible who the pupil was, that is by asking as few questions as     possible.
I wrote down the questions and who had asked them, as well as how many alternatives the question eliminated.
Kalle asked, ‘Is the person a girl?’ This was a good question as it cut out 7 of the possible 15 names.
They got more points if they had a strong question.

One group needed only 6 questions to be left with one name; the other group needed only 4 questions.
(They were not allowed to ask directly the name.)
When only one was not scored out, it had to be the right answer.

Comments  

# Alexander Sokol 2011-01-23 18:28
Anni, welcome to our community. And thanks a lot for sharing this.
A few questions.
Did I understand correctly that this was the first lesson when pupils dealt with the yes-no game trying to ask powerful / good questions?
Did you have a chance to discuss the strategy for asking powerful questions with your pupils? If so, how did you do it?
Many thanks.
# Anni Savisaari 2011-01-26 18:06
Thank you!

You understood correctly. We discussed the strategy for asking powerful questions during the next version of the YES/NO game: "What´s in the box?" You can read about it also in these pages!
Thank you for your comments!
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