What Is it All About?
Organize an event with a guest speaker from your community such as a public health expert to share their expertise about cannabis. Use an interactive game to engage students and reinforce the speaker’s message.
Why Do It?
Events like this help your school connect to community experts and engage in dialogue to promote everyone’s well-being. Using an interactive game helps all participants because it makes learning more about an topic more interesting.
How Do We Do It?
Work with your team and your adult ally to find a local community expert to engage participants in a conversation about cannabis.
Create your interactive game called “Did You Hear That?” by using your community expert’s presentation notes and/or questions. Request that they send you their presentation materials ahead of time and explain your intent with respect to the notes. There are several game-based learning platforms and technological tools you can use to create your game.
Decide when you will hold your event and advertise it in order to generate interest.
At different points throughout the presentation, have the community expert pause and say, “Did You Hear That?” Then engage the participants in your interactive game by having them try to correctly answer a question related to something the speaker just said.
If the game includes a way to score points, consider awarding prizes to the three participants with the most points in the game.
Consider scheduling time in the presentation for participants to ask questions.
Ideas for Use in a Variety of Settings
Using available technology, work with your team members to find a local community expert to engage participants in a conversation about cannabis.
Use available technology to meet with your invited community expert to experience a preview of their presentation and co-create questions for your game, “Did You Hear That?”
Use available technology to advertise and run your virtual session.
Consider scheduling time into your presentation for participants to ask questions.
Consider asking your community expert to invite colleagues to join a virtual presentation.
What Else Do We Need?
- A community expert
- A team to prepare the interactive game and lead it
- Technology for students to use to engage in the interactive game
- Prizes for the winner or three highest scoring participants of the game (optional)
- Funds for an honorarium for the speaker (if needed)
- Prizes for winners (if desired)
How Do We Get Creative?
Host the presentation as part of a larger whole school event, or relate this event to a cause or topic that has a day of recognition (e.g., Weedless Wednesday, World Mental Health Day).
Invite other community members to be part of the event.
Invite the media.