Building Class-Zoom Culture
11 games, activities, and strategies that worked for us at Upperline Code
In the summer of 2020, we had about 1,000 students take our immersive courses where they’d join us for 6-hour days on Zoom to learn to code.
If you’re thinking “that’s ridiculous — what student would agree to such a thing?” you’re in good company. We were pretty torn about it ourselves. But by the time we found out that our programs couldn’t run safely in person, we had already promised to offer these courses, and we felt compelled to make good on that promise.
I’ll be the first to admit that it could have been a disaster. But as the first round of classes drew to a close and we began reading student feedback, we saw more and more responses that looked like this:
“The best part was learning so much and making new friends.”
“I got to learn code really well and made new friends doing it.”
“I had a great time, the people were very nice. I learned a completely new programming language in the span of two weeks. It was great.”
These weren’t exceptions — I’ll share some aggregate analysis too. Here are our summer averages for the quantitative (1–10) questions on our end-of-course student feedback:
- “This was a worthwhile use of my time”
Score: 9.16 - “How would you rate your experience overall”
Score: 9.29 - “I had fun in class”
Score: 9.34
In fact, in the open-ended feedback, the word “fun” appeared in over 50% of student responses. That’s remarkable to me.
How did we get here?
I want to be clear that we didn’t just blindly subject 1000 students to our first attempt at remote instruction. We ran hundreds of hours of test sessions and mini-courses before the summer started to refine our approach. We recorded what we learned, and you can read that whole reflection if you like, but I raise the point here only to say that we tested this full-day model pretty extensively before we launched into it.
But even as feedback made us increasingly certain that a 6-hour videoconference was (somewhat counterintuitively) the way to go, we also knew one thing:
If we’re going to ask our students to invest the same amount of time with us this year as they did last year, each remote class needs to feel just as close and connected as last year’s in-person classes did.
That’s obviously so much easier said than done, but our teachers put their heart and soul into making it happen, and a few activities emerged as clear favorites along the way.
Without further ado, here’s what worked best for us.
1. Question of the Day
We’ve integrated a sort of motto into our classes that every student’s voice should be heard in the first 5 minutes of class if possible. So we launch every single one of our classes with a whip-around question of the day — indeed, most teachers I know are already doing this, or some variation of it. The goal is to ask something low-stakes that encourages students to break the seal on silence and be more ready to participate later, and for you to learn more about your students so you can more closely adjust future activities and lessons to their interests.
How we introduce it:
Thanks for being here today! If you’re able to join us by camera, go ahead and do so now (feel free to use a virtual background to preserve some privacy — I’ll be changing mine every day), and then we’re going to go around and share four quick things: Your name, your pronouns, where you’re calling from, and your answer to the question of the day.
I’ll write all this down in chat so you can think. While we’re answering, if someone gives their answer and you think it is awesome, you can respond with the emoji reactions or in chat.
Sample questions:
- If you had to choose just ONE food for an entire year, what food would you pick?
- What was your favorite show (or movie or book) when you were X years old?
- What’s one piece of culture (a book, song, show, game, etc) you’d recommend the rest of us check out?
- Who’s someone you admire and why?
- Scale of 1–10, how’s your week going?
Warnings:
- Beware the dreaded “after you go, call on someone else!” method of determining the speaking order — that’s always been awkward, and it’s even more awkward on Zoom. Just emcee based on the order on your screen.
- Avoid asking narrow, exclusionary questions (e.g. “What’s your favorite video game?”) or questions that are veiled opportunities for advanced students to brag (e.g. “Have you taken any coding classes before?”) or worst of all, the combo (e.g. “What’s your favorite programming language?”) — these questions are almost never asked or answered with ill-intent, but they absolutely create the impression that this class is designed for people who already love CS.
- Timing can go long here if you have classes of 30+, so maybe the QOTD is answered in breakout rooms, then pasted in chat once you reconvene, and then some students volunteer to share. Just make sure all students answer, and that you have a system to ensure that you hear different voices each day.
2. Free-for-all Scavenger Hunt
We tried this one kind of on a whim, and we feel like we’ve struck GOLD. Part of this is in the energy of how you sell it, but the point is that you’re going to announce a thing, and everyone has to go find that thing as quickly as possible. On paper, it shouldn’t work. In practice, it’s one of our greatest hits.
How we introduce it:
We’re going to do a lightning-fast scavenger hunt. You’ll likely want to turn on your camera to show off what you find, but if you need to leave your camera off, you can just explain what you find in chat. I’ll announce the search criteria, and then you need to find something that fits it as quickly as possible. I’ll award your points each round, but please keep track of them yourselves. I’ll also hand out bonus points for especially fast finds and especially cool things.
Sample questions:
- Find something with at least 5 different colors on it!
- Find something (not you) that’s at least 10 years old!
- Find something made entirely of wood!
- Find something that’s technically worth $5 or less, but that you care about more than $5 worth!
- Find something with your name on it!
- Find something that isn’t yours!
Warnings:
- Avoid asking students to find anything that is a status or wealth signifier. “Find a pair of headphones” may seem innocuous, but students will notice who showed off their AirPods Max, and speaking from personal experience, it’s even less fun to reminded of what I don’t have / can’t afford when I’m trapped in my house with my belongings.
- The success of this game hinges on your energy. Be excited (even honored) that any students are participating in this with you instead of dwelling on the few who are lower energy about the whole thing.
- Like Who’s Line, the points do not matter — the longer I teach the less effective I find “bonus points” with respect to grades.
3. Team Scavenger Hunt
This is almost the same as above, but it’s done in breakout rooms with the purpose of asking students to work together. If you send them in a group of 3 with 10 items, they’re going to have to communicate to find all 10 things quickly.
How we introduce it:
I’m posting a link to the scavenger hunt list in chat — take a photo or a screenshot if you’re on a Chromebook because the chat will erase when you get to breakout rooms. You’ll have 3 minutes to find all 10 items. Each item only needs to be found by 1 team member, but each team member needs to find at least one item (in other words, don’t leave anyone out). If you find all 10 things before time runs out, come back to the main room and let me know you’re done.
Sample questions:
We use basically the same questions as above, but may make some of them a little harder / more specific. Maybe “find a plant or part of a plant” instead of “find something made of organic matter” since between 3 of them, it’s likely someone can devise a way to snag a leaf through a window.
Warnings:
As above, please avoid prompts that invite status signifiers into the conversation, and beware of questions so open-ended that they allow students to respond to them that way — we used to say “something that both you and your partner own in common!” and then found out it was pretty common to have two students come back and show off their brand-new phones without realizing how that might feel to their peers.
4. Show & Tell
This one’s exactly what it sounds like. High school and college students love this way more than I would have imagined. If you have middle schoolers, you’ll probably need to name it something else to get them to take it seriously — one of our teachers went with “Artifact Excavation & Sharing” and that seemed to go over well.
How we introduce it:
I’m going to ask you to go into your living space and find something meaningful to you to share with the group. We might not have time to get through everyone today, so we might do this over the course of three days, and I’ll go first.
Sample questions:
- Find something you’ve had for a long time and still really care about.
- Find something with deep personal significance.
Here are some things I’ve selected as my model:
- My asparagus fern, Armando
- A Ty beanie baby unicorn I adopted on a hard day and named Vivian
- A Catbus plushie (from the movie My Neighbor Totoro)
- An autographed copy of Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona
Warnings:
- Be sure to model the level of vulnerability and length of presentation you’re hoping to get from your students. Whether you go super shallow or super deep, most of your students will mirror you, so set the tone for whatever you think will be best for your class.
5. Screenshot Challenge
Challenge your students to do the YMCA, the Brady Bunch intro, or something more creative and take a screenshot of it.
How we introduce it:
In your breakout rooms, you’ll have 4 minutes to do something related to the prompt and take a screenshot of it.
Sample questions:
The prompts themselves are usually pretty open-ended, but the student results can be amazing.
- We gave the prompt “Food” and one group created a digital food fight, where the top row of folks were dropping food down onto the bottom row.
- We gave the prompt “Teamwork” and each person screenshot another team member and put them as their OWN virtual background so it looked like there were two students in each square.
Warnings:
- Students without webcams will need to find alternate ways to participate — we’ve seen special success with students changing their display name or profile picture to fit a theme.
- It’s really easy to feel writer’s block here, so encourage them to take a backup screenshot with minimal effort right away, and follow it up with a more carefully planned one if they have time.
6. Team Murals / One Big Mural Mess
Use a prompt generator to create an art prompt. Then send students to breakout rooms and assign each group one slide from a JamBoard (or similar medium, but JamBoard works really well) to illustrate the same situation. Then call everyone back together and vote on superlatives.
How we introduce it:
Looks like the prompt generated today was “baby penguin had never been to the moon before” — I’m so excited to see how you all interpret this. I’ll write the prompt as our project title for reference, and when you get to your breakout rooms, use the slide that corresponds with your room number. You’ll have four minutes as a team to create the most beautiful mural to go along with this prompt in your breakout rooms. Ready? Go!
Warnings:
- Look, not every group of students can be trusted with drawing tools, but in my experience most can, and the accountability of being in smaller groups makes it easier to triage and conference with any outlier student who may draw something that shouldn’t be drawn in your classroom.
7. Debugger
Two debuggers leave the room to a breakout room and declare a difficulty they’d like to solve (1: easy, 10: you might never figure it out). While they’re gone, we decide on a “bug” to introduce to our classroom. They return and ask questions to figure out what the bug is. They can guess the bug as many times as they want, and when they guess right, applaud them!
How we introduce it:
As an example, the first bug might be something like everyone in jeans tells a lie, and everyone else tells the truth — that’s probably a difficulty of 3. The first time we play, I’m going to cap the difficulty at 5, and recommend a 3. After we’ve done a few rounds, we can get a bit trickier. If anyone answers in a way that violates the rule, we’ll call “ERROR!” and give you a chance to ask your question over again.
Sample bugs:
- All participants wearing glasses will answer truthfully, all others will lie (difficulty 3)
- Every third answer will be a lie (difficulty 4)
- All answers must be exactly three words long (difficulty 3)
- The first answer must begin with an “A” and the pattern progress alphabetically (difficulty 5)
- All answers must start with the same letter as the respondent’s first name (difficulty 5)
- If debugger A asks a question, lie; if debugger B asks a question, answer honestly (difficulty 6)
- All answers must start with the last letter in the question that was asked (difficulty 8)
- Respond to each question with the same number of words as were in the question (difficulty 9)
Warnings:
- This game can be time consuming. Really encourage students to hang at the lower levels of difficulty a while before progressing, and normalize taking a break to go back to learning in the middle of harder rounds.
- Students will need help long before they are willing to ask for it, and then will jump straight to “I think I give up” without asking for help. Normalize that you (and only you!) will sometimes jump in and ask them to do something specific (e.g. “ask Marcus the same question you just asked Janelle, and do it 6 times in a row”) rather than give hints or outright answers. This offers students the chance to gather data that will surface the pattern a bit more clearly.
8. Pair Programming
This isn’t a game, but we do think it’s one of the most important things we do. My fastest friendships have been forged working together on something, and after students get used to it, “more time to work with my partners” is our most common request in end-of-day feedback.
How we introduce it:
In your breakout rooms, do all of the following:
Introduce yourself and learn what your partner’s favorite flavor of ice cream is.
Check in with each other on the confidence scale from 1–5, where 1 is feeling pretty scared, and 5 is feeling super confident. Whoever is feeling a little less confident will drive for the first half of the lesson.
Driver, share your screen.
Navigator, you’re not typing anything! Your goal is to share some of that confidence with them by asking them to type what we need to type.
Driver, if your navigator asks you to type anything you disagree with or don’t understand, stop and ask them why, or ask them to explain it in more detail.
I’ll paste these instructions in chat so you can see them after you get to your breakout room — if you’re on a Chrombook, take a screenshot or picture so you don’t lose the directions when you switch rooms.
Warnings:
- Spend the first 5 minutes of breakout rooms circulating to make sure screens are shared. Even students without webcams should get in the habit of sharing their screens (or just a single window) as early as possible.
- Students without microphones and with slow wifi will have a significantly harder time doing this than their counterparts. It’s often helpful to pair two students with these obstacles together, as they’re in the same boat and are more amenable to and patient about workarounds (e.g. chat collaboration in Repl.it’s built-in tool, an old-school phone call, Gchat, etc).
- You’ll want mostly pretty homogeneous groupings — some skill difference is unavoidable, but the idea that my strongest student and weakest student will average each other out is one that proved false for me like eight times in my first year of teaching before I finally let go of it. Both students almost always end up frustrated….
9. CONSENTUAL Peer Tutoring
…with that said, super heterogeneous groupings can be amazing, as long as you get consent from both parties ahead of time.
How we introduce it:
To the struggling student: I know you said yesterday that Arrays were challenging, and I have another student who felt like they got it really well yesterday — they might be willing to help work through it with you. I’ll definitely help you later once class is over if you’re still feeling frustrated, but would you be willing to try today’s lab with them first?
To the advanced student: Hey, I have a request to ask of you. Yesterday, you absolutely crushed the lesson on Arrays. I had a few students who asked for a little more help, and I was hoping I could pair one of them with you for our first lab today — would you be willing to show them the ropes? It’s okay if not, but I think you’d be great at it!
Warnings:
- Sometimes students say no. That’s okay! Respect their honesty and try a different approach.
- Sometimes even students who are totally willing to be helpful don’t 100% know how. Whenever a student is taking the tutor role in a pairing like this, prioritize observing how they offer help to their peer. It may be that some (or all) of your students need a little bit more explicit modeling of what offering good help is like.
10. Precise Public & Private Praise
As teachers, it can feel really natural to compliment your top student on a job well done, but telling the student at the top of the pack that they’re doing great is often just repeating what they’ve already heard; it doesn’t usually reshape your classroom in any significant way.
As I’ve gotten older and progressed further into my teaching career, I’ve found that I get way more mileage out of praising the kindness and relationship-building I want to see in my class.
Sample praise:
In public:
Thanks for raising that bug Scott — It’s actually the same one that Tia just finished solving. Tia, can you walk Scott through how to fix his code?
Javi, I know you ended up hard-coding the solution, so it took more lines of code on your end than Lupe’s solution, but can you share your screen and show us your solution? I’d love for everyone to see that it can be done the way you did it.
In private:
Akeria, this program rocks! I know that wasn’t easy. You’ve got about 60 lines of code written and we only had to iron out three small bugs to get it working. Your code was 99% perfect — that’s absolutely something to be proud of. Thank you for working hard on this!
Josiah, thank you so much for coming back to class today — I know yesterday was super challenging, and I’m really proud of the way you jumped right back in and picked where we left off, even if you might have been feeling a little discouraged. You’ve done a fantastic job today.
Warnings:
- In my view, the point of precise praise isn’t to make sure that everyone is recognized in proportion to their expertise; rather, it’s to make sure that anyone who’s starting to feel left out or frustrated feels affirmed that they belong in my class. To that end, I find that I’m almost never congratulating my top student for writing optimized algorithms. Instead, I find myself most often cheering on my most experienced students for the way they support and encourage the beginners, and my beginners for their perseverance and self-advocacy.
- Find something that legitimately impresses you —in my experience, students see through patronizing praise 100% of the time.
11. Shout Outs
Praise from a teacher can be encouraging, but it can also feel like they are performing a rote and teacherly duty. That’s why we close out our days by making space for students to shout each other out.
How we introduce it:
Today was an amazing day, so to close out the day, we’re going to go around the room and shout out two people each. First, shout yourself out for something you did today that you’re proud of, and second, shout someone else out who made your day better.
Sample shout outs:
I’m going to shout myself out for finally figuring out for loops, and I’m going to shout out Marin for working with me in the lab —She did a better job of explaining it than Jeff did, at least in a way that I could understand it, and I feel like I get it a lot better now.
Warnings:
You’ll always have at least one student who is happy to shout out others, but struggles to shout themselves out. You’ll also usually have at least one who feels the opposite, and is proud of themselves but can’t think of anything to say about anyone else. Don’t make a big deal out of it publicly, but do follow up with them the next day at lunch and explain why both halves of that equation are so important. Ask them if they start thinking about it now so that they can have an answer ready by the end of the day.
Conclusion
We used to rely on Ninja, the human knot, a giant game of ranked rock-paper-scissors where you had to act like a chicken at certain ranks and a velociraptor at others, and frequent trips outside as a class to make space for our students to trust us and get to know one another.
We weren’t sure if we’d still be able to make that space for our students, but this summer we proved to ourselves we could.
Please use whichever of these you find useful — for me personally, remote teaching sometimes feels like first-year teaching all over again, and that’s a year no one wants to repeat.
