Make My Jeopardy

Jeopardy for college classes and exam review

The review session before a midterm is the one class where attendance is voluntary and attention is not guaranteed. A board changes the shape of it — instead of you working through a problem set at the front, the room is arguing about which clue to take and why the $800 answer was wrong. It also works at lecture-hall scale, because everyone brings their own buzzer.

Running a review session

  1. Build the board from the exam blueprint

    Categories by topic, values by difficulty. Pulling clues from the actual assessment weighting is what makes the session worth attending rather than a novelty — students can tell the difference immediately.

  2. Decide how big the room plays

    In a seminar, individuals. In a lecture hall, rows or sections as teams, with one phone per team. There is no cap on players, so the constraint is discussion, not the software.

  3. Share the code on the screen

    The presenter view shows a five-letter code. No roster, no LMS integration, no enrolment step — which means a guest lecturer or a TA can run the same board without being added to anything.

  4. Use the wrong answers

    The value of a review game is in the clues the room gets wrong. Budget time to stop on those instead of racing the board, and expect to cover fewer clues than you planned.

  5. Close with Final Jeopardy

    One hard clue, wagered on before it is shown. It is the natural place to put the synthesis question the exam will actually ask.

Why it scales to a lecture hall

  • Every student already has the buzzer. There is no hardware to distribute and no range limit, so the back row plays on the same terms as the front.
  • No enrolment. Nothing to sync with the LMS and no accounts to provision, so a session can be arranged the day before.
  • One board, many sections. Duplicate it per section, or hand the link to a TA and let them run their own.
  • It works over a video call too, which covers the students who dial into a hybrid review.

Writing clues at this level

The failure mode in a college board is not difficulty, it is ambiguity. A clue with two defensible answers is a clue that ends in an argument you have to adjudicate in front of a hundred people, and at this level the room is well equipped to argue.

Pin every clue to a single answer with a second identifying fact, and write the answer down as you write the clue. If you are drafting in a spreadsheet — which is how most people build a board this size — import the sheet rather than retyping it.

Cost

A 6 × 5 board with buzzers, live scoring and Final Jeopardy is free, with no account. Pro is $10 a year and adds boards up to 12 × 10 for a full two-round game, AI drafting, media clues, spreadsheet import and a dashboard for the boards you reuse each term.

Common questions

How many students can play at once?

There is no limit in the software — every student plays on their own phone, so the practical ceiling is the size of the room. Above about eight individual players, teams make for a better session because more of the room is talking.

Does it integrate with an LMS?

No, and that is the point of the join code: there is no roster to sync and no enrolment step, so a review session can be set up the day before and a TA can run it without being added to anything.

Can I run a full two-round game?

Yes, on Pro, which raises the board to 12 × 10 — enough for a Jeopardy round and a Double Jeopardy round with doubled values. The free 6 × 5 board with Final Jeopardy is a complete single-round game.

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