Truth Table Olympics

There's a lot of talk in K-12 and higher ed these days about "gamification," which is  just what it sounds like--using a gaming design to interest students in learning.  Vocabulary like "leveling up" is starting to sound as familiar as "grading" to many educators.  Whether it makes sense to go full force into this way of framing college education (and, let's face it, we dusty professors mostly wish that students would just find learning intrinsically rewarding), I've always enjoyed throwing a little competition at my students in Logic, at the very least to give them a goal to train for and a group activity that's fun and different.

So, today was the 7th annual Truth Table Olympics!  I put students on teams and established a system of tip-offs and rounds which left two teams for our final round next week (with chocolate gold medals).  I think there are a lot of benefits of this activity, aside from the fact that it's fun.  Students work together to solve problems, they help each other and care about how they're doing (including empathizing with teams whose simple mistakes take them out of contention for the gold), and they get a lot of low stakes practice (because it's not a graded assignment or exam) with fairly complex logical problems.  Another benefit is that there's a lot of student work being done publicly--that is, everyone in class gets to see how others are doing.  Under some circumstances, this could be discouraging to students who are having difficulty; but with a little careful framing, I've found that it's helpful for students to see each other excelling.  It's clear that complex logic is doable, and it causes students to seek help (ideally from each other, but also from their TA and me) so that they can achieve the same goals their peers are.

Having students fill the whiteboards with correct truth tables to determine validity of arguments, and to feel proud when they finish, fills me with the thrill of victory.