Excel Battleship

My brother said that he has to teach a 20 minute lesson on Excel for his job interview on Friday.

He said that, since he has been asked to cover the basics, he was going to teach them how to play Excel Battleship. This activity teaches Excel newbies about rows, columns, cells, cell names, entering text in cells, formatting colors and borders... Fun!

Here's a link to a website from a teacher in Washington state who has done a similar Excel Battleship lesson with her students. Want to set up your own game board in Excel? Here is a handout (PDF) to help you from the Utah Education Network.

This same activity would be great for teaching math students about slope and points on a graph, according to the UEN handout.

You might be asking yourself, "Why is she mentioning this on a blog about distance learning?" It made me think that this could be a fun way for students to interact by video conference.

You could have students in different locations create 2 or 3 game boards and compete by video conference to see who can sink the most battleships. The teachers could set up the templates and the students in each class could plot their own battleships on the Excel template before the connection.

This might be a fun way for students to get to know each other at the beginning of a collaborative IVC project.

Depending on your experience with Excel and your goal for the IVC connection, you could take this to another level by having students use some advanced features of Excel to create a review activity to share during a connection such as a self-checking quiz. As students from the other class answer, your class can type their responses into the spreadsheet to see if they are correct or incorrect.

If you meet with a class, or multiple classes, periodically throughout the year, you could keep track of the weather for the areas where the participating classes are located in a spreadsheet.

What other ways can you think of to use Excel with video conferencing?

Questions? Contact us! DL@gstboces.org