Digitalization in a Literature Examination: Playing “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” on J. Milton and D. Mamin-Sibiryak

Abstract

The paper describes the experiment of creating a "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" game with the help of a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. This presentation (or, rather, set of presentations) appears to be a useful test tool at literature examinations, thus opening new possibilities for test technologies. As today's students get fed up with traditional tests, which include a closed set of answer variants, the "Millionaire" technology, non-traditional and computer-based is supposed to arise students' interest in the subjects where facts are of no less importance than their interpretation. One of such subjects is literature at the university, so the samples of the questions are taken from the tests on one English writer (J. Milton) and one Russian (D. Mamin-Sibiryak). The authors show the process of creating a "Millionaire" presentation, find out the difficulties and the possible ways to omit them. The literature test in the form of the "Millionaire" game is shown to have some problems for the teacher, who needs to take into account a lot of details concerning hyperlinks, "lifelines" ("50:50", "Answer a Friend", "Ask the Audience"), and the accompanying music. All this effort is compensated, however, by the students' enthusiasm. They always wish to win the final prize, and thus are ready to read books for the examination. What makes the "Millionaire" even more useful is its compatibility with the "point rating system" accepted in a number of Russian universities.