Here is something that I did at a recent class reunion; it was a really different way to use Audience Response Pads and the BRAVO! Game Builder Suite for me especially since I primarily use “games” and show people how to use games as serious teaching tool. Initially I volunteered to make a trivia game to place on a website prior to the reunion, but someone thought “hey” wouldn’t it be great to play a few games at the reunion? So it was said, and so I got to work, it really was pretty easy coming up with the questions, thanks to having class yearbook at hand (did I really have all that hair?), and the internet, I grabbed photos from the yearbook and even grabbed photos and created a few question based off classmates Facebook pages, (ain’t the web a grand tool?). When creating the game I was trying to figure out a way to play the game at the event. I had many options, ring in devices, single player, teams, etc. But I decided I wanted to involve as many people as possible in the game and to try and make is as fun as possible. I decided I was going to play in teams and to get everyone involved I was going to use Audience Response Pads so everyone could play. I then came up with a name for the game “Do you Trust the Audience”, (I am so clever sometimes I even amaze myself) the title will make sense as you read on. Here is the basic premise of how the game was played, we broke the audience into 2 teams, and each player had their own Audience Response Pad (ARS), each ARS pad was assigned to one of the teams, when the questions would appear they would submit their answer via the ARS pads and the game would track all the responses for each person and tally up the score of each team. To play the game, and this is where the title “Do you Trust the Audience?” comes in, I would pick a “contestant”, this contestant would choose the answer for each question. Here is how it worked, when a question appeared in the game, each audience member would submit their individual answer via the ARS pad, when all the answers where submitted, I would not reveal the answer quite yet, I would just reveal the overall votes for each possible answer. For example when I reveal the results of the votes submitted I could see that 65% of the audience picked answer A, and 30% picked answer B and the remaining picked C as an answer. I would then ask the “contestant” do you “Trust the Audience?” or do you want to choose your own answer. Whatever the “contestant” chose is how I would reveal the answer. Surprisingly, we found that the majority vote was not always the correct answer and in some cases the answers were all over the place showing that the audience did not have any clear consensus on what the correct answer was. Another fun moment in the game is after the “contestant” picked an answer, the moment of truth of which team won the round came, this is where were game would display with a little fan fair the overall percentage of correct responses for each team. The “contestant” in this case was really a prop for the game, I needed a way to reveal the answer, I could have just simply chose the most popular response but if there was a tie I would have to choose which answer to reveal, not a big deal but by choosing a “contestant” I was able to have them choose the answer. Just using the ARS pads and breaking the group into teams was a hit on its own, but adding the “contestant” was the icing on an already great tasting cake. After the event, I then easily modified the games for the web (changed out the intro screen, the initial one Was titled “Do you Trust the Audience”, since the online version would play differently from the event version I changed the names and added a thank you note to thank the organizers in the opening screen, the game now is being be shared with those that could not attend or if people wanted just play it again. To see sample trivia games click on links: 1979 Trivia Example 1 and 1979 Trivia Game 2 John Dillon, C3 SoftWorks, johnd@c3softworks.com