Have you had a ‘Wiki-race’ yet?

Now when my colleague Paul AKA @hozmeister mentioned Wiki-races to me today I thought he was going on about Dick Dastardly and Mutley, how I was wrong!

He was actually talking about a game involving wikipedia – he was so desperate to write another guest blog about this so here it is:

I’m not a fan of Scott Mills on radio 1, we don’t see ear to ear when it comes to music, but I caught part of his show yesterday that got my attention.  He was talking about a simple game you can play with Wikipedia, the web 2 encyclopaedia tool (www.wikipedia.org).

The rules are simple – you start on one page (e.g. the Saltash.net page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltash.net) and have to get to another , seemingly totally unrelated page (e.g. Blood Diamond, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_diamond) by only using the links within the pages. You record the pages you visit (e.g. in MS Word) and whoever does it in the least pages/links wins.

I have tried it today with both a year 8 and year 9 group and they both loved it. I let the winner choose the next challenge each time, my favourite being Justin Bieber to Bacteria!

I found it was an interesting activity because as they scan the page for possible links to follow, they are reading about topics they normally wouldn’t have any interest in. Also, just attempting to make the link between two unrelated topics is high end thinking.

Have a go, but be warned a game you think might last 2 minutes can go on some and it’s hard to get them to stop once they are close!

@Hozmeister

If you have a go at the ‘wikirace’ then please let us know or post a response to #wikirace. More information about these can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikirace

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *