Making games in Jamboard

The countdown has begun! Winter break is upon us! Despite the challenges of this school year where many students are virtually learning, we can leverage digital tools to connect and have a little fun before the end of classes this week!

Jamboard is a digital whiteboard tool that has many uses. Many educators have used it for synchronous and asynchronous learning activities. Similar to other Google for Educations tools, it allows for real-time collaboration which is perfect for groups of students to engage in a task such as playing a game. 

Playing games in Jamboard is a great way to connect with your students and count down to the winter break. These games can be easily created using the features in Jamboard and shared with your students during a synchronous virtual lesson. Sharing a Jamboard with edit permissions to your students will allow them play the games and whereas a variety of games can be placed in different frames allow students to move from one to another within the same file. 

How do you create these games in Jamboard? 

Here are four  examples of how I built each of these games and hopefully they will inspire you and give you the ability to create your own! 

1. Four in a Row

Did you know that you could draw straight lines in Jamboard?

By holding down shift before you use any of the drawing tools, it will create a straight line! This is a great tip when creating your own game board. The other reason why drawn lines are used for the game board is that lines cannot be moved with the select tool. In many of the examples, the game pieces are shapes that can be moved and just like it real life, it's frustrating when the game board moves! Drawings can only be erased, which is perfect when playing games where things need to be moved around!

Create a 5 x 7 grid with the draw tools.  To create the game pieces, use the shapes tool and create circles. These shapes can be customized in terms of their outline colour and fill colour. Keyboard shortcuts work in Jamboard so using copy/paste functions as well as duplicate (Ctrl + D or Command + D) works! 

To play, students take turns placing a game piece at the bottom of the board in a square. If there is a piece already there, place it in the adjacent square above it. Keep taking turns placing game pieces until there are 4 pieces of the same colour in a row in any direction.

2. Word Tiles 

One distinct feature in Google Jamboard versus the other Google for Education digital tools are the sticky notes. These sticky notes are great for students to jot down their ideas, but work beautifully as a text-based manipulative. In this game, each sticky note is a letter and I've modified the scrabble set of letters for this game to be played by two people by halving the number of tiles.  To create these letter tiles, you can simply go through the alphabet as a new sticky note will appear and be spaced out automatically on your frame.

Once you have all your letters, you can use the keyboard short cuts to duplicate the number of letters that you need.  To help with the randomization, duplicate the letters in a random order as it changes which letters are at the back/front and will save you some time to shuffle the order of the letters.  Another tip is to also resize the letters from their default shape so the game play is a little easier.

To play the game, shuffle the letters by dragging and dropping them into a pile. Each player takes seven letter tiles and places them on the edge.  Players can take turns spelling words and beyond the first word, others must branch off another word vertically or horizontally. After each turn, drag more tiles from the pile to get back to seven tiles. 

3. Chinese Checkers

I have fond memories of playing Chinese checkers with my family. Creating this game in Jamboard utilized on of the newest updates which is uploading an image as a background. By clicking the background button in the top menu, you are able to upload from your device/drive or use the built in image search to find an image or Gif to upload. The benefit of uploading an image is similar to drawings, where the select tool is unable to move it! This is a perfect option for creating a game board so that it doesn't get moved when playing the game. 

Using Google image search with the settings set to search for images labelled as creative common licence, I found an image of a Chinese checkers board that I could use.  I uploaded that as a background to Jamboard. The final step of the process is to create the game pieces to move. Using the shapes tool, I created small circles similar to the size of the game board and customized them by changing the outline of the shape and fill. Using keyboard shortcuts, I duplicated the pieces and placed them on the game board.

4. Snakes and Ladders

The last game I created was trying to solve the problem of not having a dice to play games that required movement along the game board. Thinking about the features in Jamboard, it dawned on me to use the eraser tool with drawings to reveal numbers that could replicate a dice. 

Similar to the Chinese checkers game (3), I found a creative commons license image of a snakes and ladder board and uploaded that as the background. 

Using the text box tool, I create vertical columns of text of numbers one to six. I didn't create rows of numbers as the spacing would be too close and it was annoying to have to press the spacebar so many times. Making a vertical column allowed me to space them apart easily by pressing enter between the numbers creating a column of numbers with even spacing between them.  I duplicated the number column text boxes and edited the numbers in the column to randomize the numbers. 

To create the number reveal, I used the draw tool and coloured over the numbers to hide them. Doing this on my smartphone touch screen really helped versus trying to do this with my laptop. I created game pieces with the shapes tool and customized to easily tell them apart. 

To play the game, each participant will use the eraser and reveal one of the numbers and move their game piece accordingly. Since there are limited numbers, I adjusted the game rules where the person who reaches the end wins or the person that is the furthest ahead after all the numbers have been revealed wins!

I hope that you are inspired to try to create your own collaborative games in Jamboard and have fun with your students. To help you get started, you can download a copy of the 4 games that I created here. Please subscribe to the blog as this will be a new space to share how-tos and resources. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or to share how did it go with your class!