Interactive Spreadsheets

Interactive spreadsheets are awesome!! I always thought of Excel as a program that was only used by people in finance and business. I always saw my business major friends using Excel in their homework assignments and complaining about it. I never thought that it could be used to create such an exciting and interactive activity for an elementary level classroom. Interactive spreadsheets can be used for any subject and in any grade level. They make for a great review or enrichment activity in the classroom. In an elementary school classroom, I think that the teacher should be the one that makes the spreadsheet game, and the students play it. However, in upper grade levels, I think it would be a great idea to have students make the spreadsheets on their own. Given detailed, step-by-step, and some previous knowledge of Excel, I think that this activity could easily be one that requires the students make a spreadsheet game to share with the class.

I think a great way to use these spreadsheets would be to have a collection of them on the classroom website. This gives the students a place to go while they are at home to work on skills or concepts in a way that is fun and interactive, or even to play them just for fun! If an upper-grade class made interactive spreadsheets, they could all be loaded on the website so that students could explore the work of their classmates. The only downside to creating an interactive spreadsheet is that it is rather time consuming, and students who are not very tech savvy may have a difficult time.

In this project, I chose to continue the space topic I started in my Inspiration project. I decided to format my Inspiration project in a way that the questions were stated in a "I am..." clue. The first person clues are to be answered with the space object that is being described. I alternated the colors of each line and removed the grid lines in order to make it easier to read. I added graphics to make the game more aesthetically appealing, and the picture of the solar system also serves as an aid to students when figuring out which planets are which.