Spreadsheet Races

It would be nice if I could say that I planned all this but in fact I stumbled across this idea when teaching spreadsheets. First, I must explain the background.

When learning about spreadsheets I have found that some students wasted significant time scrolling down to see how far the numbers went. I would often tell them to try it at home rather than doing it in class, but it never worked. Curiosity was too strong and then they wanted to have races to see whose computer could do it faster.

This time I tried a different approach. I told them we would all have a race. I was going to use the GOTO command to jump to the last row and beat them all because I knew most of them would just use the down arrow key. I was a little surprised when 3 boys beat me and finished in about 1 second. I asked them to tell the class how they got there so fast. They had used control-down arrow which of course is even quicker than the GOTO command. We had a brief discussion about alternative ways to move around in Excel and moved on.

So far I haven’t seen anyone scrolling up and down for minutes at a time, so it looks like I achieved my goal and the students still had their fun. Now I need to find more fun ways to help them keep learning.