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How Much Are You Willing to Risk? The Leap of Faith, 1999 to Now
The third game on my 1999 ToolBook CD was a bridge. Eleven stones over a black chasm, a doorway in the cliff, and a title in the loudest pink ToolBook had: The Third Challenge. Answer a question, step to the next stone. Reach the door and you win. It worked. Kids leaned toward the screen…
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Atticus, Boo, and a Mad Dog: Rivet Your Attention Goes to Maycomb
English teachers, this one’s for you. Every year somebody reads To Kill a Mockingbird, and every year somebody mixes up Miss Maudie and Calpurnia, or can’t say why a dog in the street matters. So I built a board for it. Rivet Your Attention puts every card face up. The pink cards are pictures: Atticus…
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Rivet Your Attention: Match the Graph, Beat the Clock
Remember the matching cards? Vocabulary word on a colored card, definition on a white one, and a table of students racing to pair them up. It was one of the simplest review tools in the room, and one of the few that got every kid leaning in. It’s back, rebuilt for the browser. Rivet Your…
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Pick a Square, Any Square: The Quiz Show Is Back From 1999
In 1999 I built a Jeopardy-style review game on a CD, loaded it with Astronomers, Doctors, Philosophers and Musicians, and handed out copies at Georgia teacher conferences. Most of those CDs are coasters now. The game deserved better. So here it is again, rebuilt for the browser: Quiz Showdown, the newest duel on DuelingHistory.com. No…
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Gordon Central 14, Calhoun 0 — And Nobody Threw a Pass
Somewhere in Gordon County that scoreboard would start an argument. Here it only means Gordon Central answered two more questions than Calhoun did. The Football Quiz Game is new over at Dueling History, and it works like this: two teams, one field, seventy-five yards to the end zone. On every play the team with the…
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Only the Penitent Man Spells
In 1938, in a temple carved into the rock at Alexandretta, Indiana Jones stands at the edge of a floor of lettered stones and recites the clue from his father’s diary: the name of God. He steps on J — and the stone gives way. The mistake is a real one. Classical Latin had no…
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King Tut, the Fonz, and a Very Large Cardboard Pyramid
Steve Martin debuted “King Tut” on Saturday Night Live in April 1978, backed by a band billed as the Toot Uncommons — in real life, members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. A comedy bit became a real hit single and sold over a million copies. The clip on Dueling History is the road version.…
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Everybody Wants to Rule the World — 72 of Them Actually Did
Tears for Fears released it in 1985. Four minutes and eleven seconds, and the title turned out to be a decent summary of Roman politics. Because 72 men actually did rule the world — or the part of it Rome cared about — from Augustus in 27 BC to a teenager named Romulus Augustulus in…
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Hoist the Black Flag: Ray Stevens Comes Aboard
Every history teacher needs a way to get the room quiet. Some of us use a bell. Ray Stevens used a pirate. He was born Harold Ray Ragsdale in Clarkdale, Georgia, in 1939 — one of our own — and he has spent sixty-odd years proving that a funny song and a serious song are…
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