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Charades

No talking, no spelling — act it out before the clock runs dry.

? How to play — 30 seconds
  1. Type your words below — or tap a sample pack — then pick teams, rounds and seconds per turn.
  2. The acting team sends one guesser to sit facing the class, back to the screen.
  3. Click Flash the word — the rest of the team acts it out. No talking, no mouthing, no spelling!
  4. ✓ Got it = +1 point and the next word flashes. When time’s up, the next team takes the stage.

▶ Prefer video? Watch “How to Play Charades (wikiHow)” — YouTube, under 2 minutes

🧭 When to use this, and what to say afterwards

Best moment: The first ten minutes, to check whether they can actually define the week’s terms in their own words.

What it looks like in different courses

  • CCSTTwenty technical terms, each with three forbidden words.
  • CCHUCritical terms students often use without being able to define.
  • CCAITerms from the field that sound obvious and are not.

Now ask them — the part that turns the game into learning

  1. Which term was hardest to describe? What made it slippery?
  2. Give me a one-sentence definition of that term now, and this time you may use the forbidden words.
  3. Which two of these are easy to confuse? What is the difference that actually matters?

Do not use this when: Avoid with terms that cannot be described without their own vocabulary. Try one yourself before class; if you cannot do it, they cannot either.

✨ Make these with AI — no typing, paste them straight in
  1. Copy the prompt below.
  2. Open any AI chat you already use, upload your slides / reading / handout, and paste the prompt.
  3. Copy the AI's whole reply and paste it in the box underneath. Your builder fills itself — then edit anything you like.
You are helping a university tutor turn course material into a classroom game.

I am uploading my course material (slides, reading or handout). Use ONLY that material and write 20 key terms, concepts and figures from the material that a student could act out or describe without saying the word itself, each with three forbidden words.

Return plain text, ONE ITEM PER LINE, in exactly this format:
Term (forbidden word, forbidden word, forbidden word)

Two correct example lines:
Globalisation (world, trade, connected)
Opportunity cost (choice, give up, economics)

Rules:
- Separate the fields with the vertical bar | and nothing else.
- One item per line. No numbering, no bullets, no headings, no commentary.
- Never use a line break inside an item.
- Keep every field short enough to read from the back of a lecture room.
- Base every item on my uploaded material, not on general knowledge.
- Do NOT use the | separator for this game — one term per line, forbidden words in round brackets.
- The forbidden words are the three words someone would most obviously reach for.
- Choose terms that can actually be described in a sentence or mimed — skip anything abstract to the point of impossible.
- Put the whole answer in ONE code block so I can copy it in one click.

⚠ Before you upload anything, stop and decide what is safe to send.Never upload student IDs, student numbers, grades, marks, results, or anything that could identify a student — and never paste them into the boxes below either. Remember that what you upload may not be yours to give away: publishers' readings, textbook chapters, exam papers, colleagues' slides and material you licensed rather than wrote are usually someone else's property. Many free AI tiers keep what you send and may train on it, so read that tool's own terms first. Protect yourself — when in doubt, upload your own summary or notes instead of the original file.

Set up the game
Teams
2
Rounds (each team acts once per round)
3
Seconds per turn
The words — one per line
CCST · CCGLForbidden words: photosynthesis, inflation, evolution