Fifteen Years of Review Games: From Hand-Built Sites to AI

I've been doing this forever. Since around 2010, I've been making review games for my students, first by hand and now with AI. Three states, three websites, and one idea that hasn't changed: a quick, replayable game, organized by unit, helps students review. Here's the timeline.

Virginia, around 2010: Civics and Economics. My first site was Mr. D's Virginia SOL Civics and Economics, built for the state SOL test and useful for the naturalization test too. It's organized into six unit hubs: Citizenship, Principles and Significant Documents, National Government, Politics, State Government, and Economics, plus an All Units Review page. Each hub stacks daily notes, visuals, activities, classwork, and YouTube lessons, with review games at the bottom. The home page promised 15 minute videos for every lesson.

The site kept growing. In 2015 I added Scratch games to the Constitution unit. In the Parts of the Constitution game, students draw a card and place it on the right part of the Constitution. A second Scratch game covers the Fundamental Political Principles: students move a dot to the correct answer tile and lose a heart for each wrong answer. For the end of the year, the All Units Review page has review sheets and an SOL review booklet project, where students build an illustrated review book in PowerPoint, one page per topic, from economics through the courts and politics.

North Carolina, 2014: US and World History. My next site, Social Studies Games and Review at ncss2014.weebly.com, covered middle school US History and 7th grade World History. The US History games page links more than 100 review games that I built and collected, and the World History games page links nearly 60. A handful appear on both, so the total is about 150 different games.

The tools of 2014. Most of the games live on Review Game Zone, a free site where you type in questions and multiple choice answers and it turns them into games. Others came from ClassTools.net, a free site with an arcade game generator, and a few were Scratch projects. Every question I wrote was typed by hand. Every game was its own link, pasted onto a page one at a time. It was slow work. It was also worth it.

Organized by unit, again. The US History page runs from Unit 1, A New Nation, through Unit 10, Modern America. Each unit has its own short list of games, most of them numbered so students can work through them in order. A second section, NC Final Exam Games, covers the whole course for end of year review, with each game tagged L2 or L4 by level. The World History page stretches from the Renaissance and Reformation to globalization and modern issues. The Unit 1 page puts study games from the 2014 to 2015 school year right next to daily notes, flashcards, and a Jamestown project where students built colonial settlements in Minecraft or Minetest.

Games that work for every student. The schools and communities I've worked in are diverse. In Virginia, I taught at a Title 1 school in a rural community that was half low-income mountain and half wealthy beach resort. In North Carolina, I taught at an inner city charter school in Durham and an inner city alternative school in Thomasville, with students of all races. The games worked for everyone. A good review game doesn't care where a student comes from. Everyone gets the same fair shot, and everyone can play again and do better.

What carries forward. The core ideas haven't changed. A review game should be quick, so students can play it in a few minutes. It should be replayable, so a student who misses a question can try again. And it should be organized by unit, so a teacher can find the right game the day before the quiz.

Ohio, now: built with AI. Today I teach 11th grade Government and Economics at Vantage Career Center in Ohio, and what has changed is how the games get made. Now we build them with AI. Claude, the AI assistant I work with, writes the base code and a set of written instructions, and then Grok Build handles the visual code. Instead of filling in someone else's template, we can design each game around the lesson. I'm still the one deciding what matters and testing every version, just like I was when I typed questions into Review Game Zone.

What teachers can use today. The old Virginia and North Carolina games are still online, and they're still free. The Review Game Zone and Scratch games open right in a browser. A few of the older outside links have aged out over the years, so try a game yourself before you assign it.

If you want to build review games of your own, start the way I did: one unit, a handful of quick games, and a page that keeps them in order.

You can play the new Ohio Government and Economics games for free at https://games.theaiteacherlab.com/. Try them yourself before you use them in class, and let me know how your students do.

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