Start your engines! Because Rehash Rally is a turbo-charged way for teachers to upgrade any otherwise ho-hum review activity. With five different circuits to choose from and more than 30 different individual activities to serve as unique “legs” of this playful sprint through your course content, this brand new collection of resources puts students squarely in the driver’s seat and challenges them to navigate all sorts of obstacles to connect what they’re learning to earlier units!
And here’s the best part: it’s not simply a race to see which team can get the job done first.
Borrowing from the spirt of traditional road rallies that are actually an endurance race through some of the most fascinating places on earth, the Rehash Rally doesn’t just reward racing to the finish line. In fact, a classic road rally is not about speed; in fact, there are severe penalties for finishing too early. And from Italy’s famed Mille Miglia to the iconic American Gumball Rally, winners are also determined based on the cleanliness, condition and elegance of their vehicle when they reach the finish line. The idea of a rally is to travel from a point to another within a certain time frame — moving neither too fast nor too slow — while trying to match a speed average set by the race organizers.
This is a radical departure from the “beat the buzzer” type challenges that dominate the edtech space. Because in far too many of those contests, students blindly start button mashing guesses at low-level content recap questions just to be the first to lock in an answer, and learners who might need additional time or those putting in some extra effort to work towards higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy with more detailed answers end up eating the dust of their classmates.
As they say: speed kills. And the Rehash Rally helps teachers correct those design flaws in order to create a more inclusive, rigorous, and engaging approach to classroom content review.
Let’s take a look under the hood and see just a few of the sights we have in store for this action-packed lineup of resources.
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6 COURSES + 31 LEGS = A MILLION WAYS TO PLAY
Each Rehash Rally presents student teams with the opportunity to work with their peers to complete a series of legs to a larger race that can easily be scaled to fill an entire class period of 45, 60, 90 minutes or longer. The trick is: there is a fixed amount of time that will be dedicated to each leg of the journey — and so there is no incentive whatsoever for teams to race through their work and finish early.
Much like an exercise routine in a gym (where you’d stack multiple activities back to back), it might help to think of the Rehash Rally as a sort of mental “exercise circuit” of smaller activities, each one placed in close succession back to back with the others. The idea behind this format is that the amount of time dedicated to each of these “exercises” has intentionally been limited (“how many jumping jacks can you do in 60 seconds?”), but the total amount of work that a student team can complete in that time frame is entirely up to them.
In designing the Rehash Rally, we’ve dedicated just enough time to each smaller activity so that it can provide students with a welcome degree of novelty and challenge without ever wearing out its welcome. Â
(And, of course, every leg of each race is fully editable at your discretion. So if you don’t like one of the activities in the collection, all you have left to do is swap out any of the legs of the race contained in the slides and select the appropriate timer for the amount of time you’d like your students to devote to it. The fun of the Rehash Rally is that it is a perfect balance of fast-paced engagement strategies for students and speedy pop-and-swap editing for teachers. So once you’ve fine tuned each activity to your liking, simply fire up your slideshow and you’re off to the races!)
The activities featured in this blog post are just a handful of the 600+ resources available in the EMC² Learning library. This entire library is available to Engagement Engineers and members of the Creative Corps, and is included with your annual site membership. We hope you’ll consider joining us as an Engagement Engineer to unlock a full year of site access. For complete details including our exclusive limited time offer for annual site membership, click here.
