Process

PART ONE - Game Show Preparation

1. First, organize yourself into a team of 4 or 5 students. This will be your Colony. Together, you will be responsible for learning about Canada's pioneers as they moved westward. You will learn about them by looking at specific web sites. You will be given at least two forty minute time periods to search your sites and learn and record the information gathered there. See the assigned Colonies.

2. Once you've examined the sites given to you, you will be given another forty minute time period to review your sites and individually create four multiple choice questions that can be answered from the information on your sites. You and your Colony members should refer to the guidelines for creating the questions. The four questions should consist of one from each of three levels: easy, medium and hard, and one from the category of your choice.
- The easy questions should be simple recall questions,
- the medium questions should compare and contrast roles within your sites, and
- the hard questions should require some analysis of the information.

3. You will then get together with your Colony and compile your team's questions . You will have at least one 40 minute period to compile and revise the questions together. Some questions may need to be omitted, others may need to be completely reworded. Change them as necessary to fit your team's thinking but in the end, have five good questions in each of the categories (easy, medium, and hard). When you have finished, give them to your teacher overnight for feedback.

4. Your questions will be returned to you and you have a final forty minutes to revise them, and make your final copy. You must have a minimum of 15 questions.

5. Your Colony must now decide who will answer the questions in the first, second and third rounds. The "player" assigned to each round will answer each of the five questions your team has created, so today is the day you practice and make sure each person knows all of the answers.

6. The game will be played, with the lifelines being:
- Phone the Colony (confer with your team members),
- Switch places (where you can switch places with a team member if you do not remember an answer)
- and 50/50 (Remove two of the incorrect choices so that you are choosing from only two answers - one right and one wrong)

Your Colony must now develop a commercial designed to advertise the role that the Canadian Pioneer group that you studied played in helping to expand Canada westward. Try to concentrate on how the group showed pioneer qualities such as risk-taking, perseverance, ingenuity, a sense of forethought and planning, and others you may find as you study the material. Be sure to look at the Evaluation Rubric to help you understand more about what your commercial should contain and how it will be evaluated.

Now that you have practiced your fifteen questions and written and designed your commercial, you are finally ready to play the game Who Wants to Be a Pioneer? in front of a real audience. Your real audience is the rest of the colonies (classmates) and any other guests you may wish to invite.

Set up the game as you have seen it done on television. Choose someone in the class to be the game's host (asks all the questions) and turn all colony questions into that person. Then invite your classmates or guests to try their luck in playing the game.