This idea was submitted by Amanda Torres on the #110 Slack channel. We are moving it here to preserve it past the 90-day limit!

Hi everyone, I wanted to share an activity I did this week that seemed to go over pretty well with my 110 sections. We played a modified version of “Heads Up” as a way to introduce genre, media, and conventions of genre. In Heads Up, players hold up a card to their forehead without previously reading it, and it is up to their teammates to provide clues to help the player guess what is on the card.

I made 5 cards with variety of genres and media that I felt might appeal to freshmen (superhero movies, KPop songs, beauty TikToks, crime dramas, and role-playing video games), but of course, you can choose any that you’d like. Five students were asked to volunteer to come up to the front of class, pick a card a random, and hold it up for the class to see.

The remaining 15 students were broken up into 5 groups of 3, and each group was responsible for coming up with 3 clues to help an assigned classmate standing up at the front of the room to guess their card. The stipulations for the clues were:

• Avoid giving specific examples of the genre/media
• Avoid using words from the card as part of the clue
• Try to provide clues based solely on the conventions of the media/genre, such as who is the audience, what are its common themes, how is it accessed, etc

After 5 minutes of coming up with clues, I asked each group to list their clues while I wrote them on the projector screen. Once all clues were shared, the players at the front of the class were given a chance to guess their cards. If they guessed correctly, they continued on to Round 2. If they didn’t guess correctly, they were asked to sit down and switch places with someone in their group.

After the first round of guessing, I asked the class what media seemed to be missing from Round 1’s cards. Many students noted there were no examples of written media or literature, which transitioned into Round 2: guessing 5 cards that had 5 different genres of writing (tweets, recipes, diary entries, fantasy novels, and cultural criticism/cultural commentary). We followed the same process of coming up with clues based on conventions and guessing the cards. Cultural criticism/commentary was an especially challenging one, but I wanted to include it as a way of ~ foreshadowing ~ “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”, which we will start reading soon.

The game ended after Round 2, and students noticed that essays weren’t included in the examples of written media, which transitioned neatly in to a conversation and lesson about the conventions of an essay, the conventions of academic writing, and how essays function as a genre and medium (and how they have their own subgenres, as well).

The students seemed to find the activity fun. It gave them yet another opportunity to learn one another’s names, and now we have a shared understanding of terms like “genre”, “media”, and “conventions” moving forward.