Interactive Powerpoint Games for the K-2 Classroom

Want to build some interactivity into your PowerPoint slides? Here are two easy entry-level ways that you can turn your PowerPoint slides into dynamic and interactive material.

1. Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks sound a lot more complicated than they actually are. They work like any button or box on a website. By clicking that box you’re sent to another page. So from the ‘Search’ button on Google to the ‘Buy it now!’ on Amazon – you’re already pretty familiar with them.

But did you know you can build them into PowerPoint presentations? In the same way that you can link round a web page, you can now link round a presentation.

The advantages of this are that your presentation is no longer linear. You can skip out whole sections and focus on the bits that are relevant. During a test you can link back to the theory for a recap. You can create easily navigable menus just like website home pages.

So how do you create such wizardry?

It’s probably best to hyperlink objects within your presentation. Technically you can hyperlink almost anything: text (down to a single letter), pictures, objects etc. but it’s best to stick with what looks familiar to your audience (so that’s going to be boxes, arrows, and buttons).

Once you’ve chosen your element, right click and choose the option ‘Hyperlink’.

A pop-up window will appear and on the left hand side you want to choose the option ‘Place in this document’. You should then get a list of your slides appearing.

Choose the one you want to link to, hit ‘OK’ and you’re sorted.

Remember – you can use this tool for all sorts of ways to navigate around your presentation. It might help to think of it like a web page instead of a presentation.

2. Triggers

The wonderful thing about triggers, is triggers are wonderful things. They, much like a hyperlink, can be applied to a specific element on your slide, and you can add an animation to it, so that something happens when you click it. Think of this like an internal hyperlink on your slide. You’re staying within the slide itself, but you can click things and have things change in any order – it’s the person viewing the presentation that has control.

This can be really useful for building quizzes where your participants have multiple choice questions to answer.

So first of all make your elements (the list of possible answers). Animate them so that appear as you want, then add a ‘Fill colour’ animation. Choose green for the right answer and red for the incorrect answer (if you’re going for the typical look).

Next go to the animation tab at the top of the PowerPoint window and make sure you have your animation pane open. In the animation pane click on one of the ‘Fill colour’ animations – you’ll then see at the top of the animation tab that you have the word ‘Triggers’.

Click on this and you’ll see that you get the option ‘on click of’. When you highlight that, you’ll see that all the elements on your slide are listed. Click on the one that matches your element and there you have it. When you play your slide in show mode you’ll be able to click it and the answer will change colour according to whether it’s right or wrong.

Taking it further

You should be able to do a lot with just hyperlinking and triggers. I’ve given you a few very simple ways to use both of these tools, but as you start to use them for yourselves, you’ll see how many different uses they have.

There will inevitably be things that you want to do that are just beyond the limits of PowerPoint. But there are some great pieces of software that plug into your PowerPoint and give you that option of building more sophisticated interaction.