Fun Day

I promised my students if everyone stayed on task they would receive a fun day. The fun day turned out to be better than I thought. I planned on having everyone play Armagetron an open-source simple non-violent racing game based on the 25 year old Disney Movie Tron. I didn't want to go through and and install it on every computer individually, so I loaded the exe on my website, and tried installing it from there, it worked great, and when the computer was restarted the software disappeared(as the computers are reimaged on restart). This worked out well. On my website in very small letters below the large font sizes linking to homework assignment was a simple link: game. Everyone clicked on this site and installed the game on their computers. I have seen this game played hundreds of times but have never actually played it, I played it when I tried installing it to see if it would work. I let the students figure things out, I hosted a game so that everyone would play against each other, they figured out how to change their player name and they figured out some tricks, it was really fun to watch them. With the exception of three people the entire day everyone absolutely loved this game, they loved playing on teams against each other. This "fun" day really was great, it really excited the students. I told everyone I would leave the link on my website until Christmas (as a present to them), and my website traffic has skyrocketed. Everyone that has a computer at home has downloaded it. I thought this fun day worked out well.