Presidential Knife Fights for Review

OK, so this assignment was a little outside of my comfort zone, but I tried it and the students loved it!  I got the idea from a blog post about "What if all of the Presidents were involved in a massive knife fight to the death?  Who would win and why?"  Geoff Micks went through and developed stories and reasons for all 44 Presidents about why they would or wouldn't win this arena-style Hunger Games death match (very entertaining to read).

So, taking this idea further, I showed the students the example and had them come up with their own examples using people from our second semester of study.  The ideas I have gotten back thus far are really creative!  Hide-and-seek, water balloon fight, Hunger Games, chess matches, basketball games, etc.

What does this have to do with academia?  Well, in Bloom's Taxonomy, SYNTHESIS is one of the higher-order levels of thinking.  This exercise has students use information they know to create a hypothetical situation involving abstract ideas and then EVALUATE it by backing it up with evidence.  So there you go: two of Bloom's higher levels in one review activity.  I've found most review activities to be either rote memorization or recall activities.