Blog > The 10 best PowerPoint Games to play in Workshops, Classrooms & Presentations
The 10 best PowerPoint Games to play in Workshops, Classrooms & Presentations
01.01.20 • #fun #game #powerpoint #presentation.
In our last blog post, we talked about tools and tips on how to boost the audience engagement in your presentation. One of our recommended ways to do so was to play games, as they release tension and function as a fun element that lightens the mood. That’s why today we are going to list the Top 10 best games to play in your presentation.
1. Would you rather
Is it a game that everyone knows already? Probably. But did we have to include it on the list because it is just perfect for playing with your audience? Definitely. The game is pretty much self-explanatory – You give your attendees two (or more) scenarios and they have to choose which one they’d rather experience. Combining the Would you rather – question with your presentation topic is usually very easy, but we also thought of some questions you could use for any topic (e.g. as an icebreaker, to get to know your audience a little better, to ask about their opinion or just as a fun element in between). You can let your audience vote by letting them raise their hands or by using an interactive poll tool such as SlideLizard .
- Would you rather A. travel back in time OR B. travel to the future OR C. stay in the present
- Would you rather A. have a long lunch break now OR B. have a short break and finish early
- Would you rather A. be able to read minds OR B. be able to fly OR C. be able to turn invisible
- Would you rather A. receive a letter from Hogwarts OR B. join Frodo on his journey OR C. Hog-what?
- Would you rather A. never be able to go on Social Media again B. never be able to read a book again
2. Charades
The popular game is not only great for your family’s game-night, but also for your presentations and workshops. Prepare a few cards that have words related to your presentation’s topic on them, let some volunteers in your audience draw and act them out. The rest of the audience has to guess the word. You can be sure that these terms and the associated performances will never be forgotten!
Small Trivia quizzes are perfect for checking and manifesting the audience’s knowledge at the end of your presentation. Instead of repeating and summing up what you have already said, you can let your participants test their knowledge right away. However, you can also use a quiz in the beginning to test your audience’s existing knowledge about a topic. But there are not only trivia quizzes: Questions about personality can also be interesting and work well as an ice breaker in the beginning. Again, we recommend a tool for poll creation, as that is the easiest way to conduct quizzes. In a recent article we listed 50 great questions (a mix of personality and trivia) , that you could use for your next presentation! And if you're a fan of quiz game shows, we also got a full Who wants to be a Millionaire PowerPoint template for you to download for free! You'll see how it looks like in the following video (be sure to turn up your sound!):
PowerPoint can be used for way more than most people know. Even we were amazed by people on the internet who created extensive games by animating content using PP. We don’t want to go that big today, but we are going to provide you with a free-to-download template of memory. You only have to add it to your presentation and customize the pictures or terms you want under the cards. Download free PPT Memory Template
5. Two Truths and a Lie
Here is another game that is just perfect when you play it with interactive poll tools. It is great for getting the audience to know you as a presenter better. Think of a fun, interesting or astonishing fact about yourself, and then invent two fake ones. Your attendees have to vote which statement they think is true. Be prepared to see some very surprised faces in your audience!
6. PowerPoint Karaoke
PowerPoint-Karaoke is the perfect improvisation game. Players are confronted with a set of slides they have never seen before and try to give a presentation as convincingly as possible. If you want to know all about this game and get some slides you can use for playing, check out our detailed blog post on PowerPoint-Karaoke .
7. Where do you stand?
For the game “Where do you stand?”, your attendees will actually have to stand up. Therefore, it is only convenient if you have enough space. If you want to get your participant’s opinion about something and get them to move a little, look no further! Create an imaginary line across the room. One end stands for one opinion, the other end for the exact opposite opinion. Your attendees can now place themselves on this line wherever they like (right in the middle, on either end or somewhere in between). You can then even interview people on the line (it is always interesting to choose two from opposite sites) and learn about their views. If you’re a little overwhelmed now, here are some examples you could use for this game:
Attention – you can of course ask about political or more controversial topics, but that may escalate and turn into a fight, which is not the purpose of the game or your presentation.
8. Describe That
Let your audience draw from cards with words on them and then describe it for the other attendees. It is basically like charades, but with words instead of acting. Some may find that too easy. In that case, you can either choose terms that are extremely hard to describe or add some “Taboo-words” to the card that can’t be used for describing.
9. True and False
Have you ever heard a crazy, bizarre fact where you didn’t think that it could be true? Perfect. You can use it in the well-known “True and False”-Game. You pick out a fact (ideally something related to your presentation topic) and then let your audience vote (you know – via an interactive poll tool like SlideLizard ) if they think it’s true or not. A tip for making statements false: Change little things about the them, like numbers, dates or names or use common misconceptions and see how many of your attendees buy into them, e.g. “Bulls are enraged by the color red” (which is false, bulls are simply enraged by movement, not specific colors).
10. The never-ending sentence
The never-ending sentence is a great game that incorporates many of your attendees and awakens their brain cells. It is perfect for keeping up their engagement and interest, especially for long presentations or workshops when you feel like some people are getting a little tired. Simply start by saying a word – it can be related to the presentation’s topic if you want – and ask a person in your audience to repeat that word and add another one – the next person to repeat those two words and add another one as well , and so on, until a sentence forms. As it gets longer the game gets a lot more difficult, because there is a lot more to remember and to repeat. The sentence can’t be ended, it has to be continued until someone makes a mistake (or until the last person in the room has added a new word). We promise that you will be left with a lot of fun, creative, and straight-up weird sentences that will make your audience laugh a lot.
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About the author.
Pia Lehner-Mittermaier
Pia works in Marketing as a graphic designer and writer at SlideLizard. She uses her vivid imagination and creativity to produce good content.
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- Interactive Presentation
11 Interactive Presentation Games to Win Easy Engagement in 2024
Lawrence Haywood • 07 November, 2024 • 12 min read
So, how to make a presentation engaging? Audience attention is a slippery snake. It's difficult to grasp and even less easy to hold, yet you need it for a successful presentation.
No Death by PowerPoint, no to drawing monologues; it's time to bring out the interactive presentation games !
Bonus : Free slideshow game templates to use. Scroll down for more👇
These 11 games below are perfect for an interactive presentation . They'll score you mega-plus points with colleagues, students, or wherever else you need a kick of super-engaging interactivity... Hope you find these game ideas below helpful!
Table of Contents
- #1: Live Quiz
#2: What Would You Do?
#3: key number, #4: guess the order, #5: 2 truths, 1 lie, #6: 4 corners, #7: obscure word cloud, #8: heart, gun, bomb.
- #9: Match Up
#10: Spin the Wheel
#11: q&a balloons, interactive powerpoint presentation games - yes or no, frequently asked questions.
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More Interactive Presentation Tips with AhaSlides
- Interactive Presentation Ideas
- Interactive Games for Training Sessions
- Interactive Presentation Techniques
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#1: Live Quiz Competition
Is there any event that hasn't been immediately improved with some trivia?
A live quiz is an evergreen, ever-engaging way to consolidate your presentation's info and check the understanding of it all amongst your audience. Expect big laughs as your audience competes fiercely over who was listening to your presentation the most complex.
Here's how to play:
- Set up your questions on AhaSlides .
- Present your quiz to your players, who join by typing your unique code into their phones.
- Take your players through each question, and they race to get the correct answer the fastest.
- Check the final leaderboard to reveal the winner!
Learn how to set up your presentation quiz for free in just a few minutes! 👇
Put your audience in your shoes. Give them a scenario related to your presentation and see how they would deal with it.
Let's say you're a teacher giving a presentation on dinosaurs. After presenting your info, you would ask something like...
A stegosaurus is chasing you, ready to snap you up for dinner. How do you escape?
After each person submits their answer, you can take a vote to see which is the crowd's favourite response to the scenario.
This is one of the best presentation games for students as it gets young minds whirring creatively. But it also works great in a work setting and can have a similar freeing effect, which is especially significant as a large group icebreaker .
- Create a brainstorming slide and write your scenario at the top.
- Participants join your presentation on their phones and type their responses to your scenario.
- Afterwards, each participant votes for their favourite (or top 3 favourites) answers.
- The participant with the most votes is revealed as the winner!
No matter the topic of your presentation, there's sure to be a lot of numbers and figures flying around.
As an audience member, keeping track of them isn't always easy, but one of the interactive presentation games that makes it easier is Key Number .
Here, you offer a simple prompt of a number, and the audience responds with what they think it refers to. For example, if you write ' $25' , your audience might respond with 'our cost per acquisition' , 'our daily budget for TikTok advertising' or 'the amount John spends on jelly tots every day' .
- Create a few multiple-choice slides (or open-ended slides to make it more complicated).
- Write your key number at the top of each slide.
- Write the answer options.
- Participants join your presentation on their phones.
- Participants select the answer they think the critical number relates to (or type in their answer if open-ended).
If keeping track of numbers and figures is challenging, it can be even tougher to follow entire processes or workflows explained in a presentation.
To cement this information in your audience's mind, Guess the Order is a fantastic minigame for presentations.
You write the steps of a process, jumble them up, and then see who can put them in the right order the fastest.
- Create a 'Correct Order' slide and write your statements.
- Statements are automatically jumbled up.
- Players join your presentation on their phones.
- Players race to put the statements in the correct order.
You might have heard of this one as a great icebreaker, but it's also one of the top interactive games to play during a presentation for checking who's paying attention.
And it's pretty simple to do. Just think of two statements using the information in your presentation, and make another one up. Players have to guess which is the one you've made up.
This one is a great re-capping game and works for students and colleagues.
- Create a list of 2 truths and one lie covering different topics in your presentation.
- Read out two truths and one lie and get participants to guess the lie.
- Participants vote for the lie either by hand or through a multiple-choice slide in your presentation.
The best presentations are ones that spark a bit of creative thinking and discussion. There's no better presentation game for evoking this than 4 Corners.
The concept is simple. Present a statement based on something from your presentation that's open to different points of view. Depending on each player's opinion, they move to a corner of the room labelled 'strongly agree', 'agree', 'disagree' or 'strongly disagree' .
Maybe something like this:
An individual is shaped more by nature than nurture.
Once everyone is in their corner, you could have a structured debate between the four sides to bring different opinions to the table.
- Set up the 'strongly agree', 'agree', 'disagree' and 'strongly disagree' corners of your room (if running a virtual presentation, then a simple show of hands could work).
- Write some statements which are open to different opinions.
- Read out the statement.
- Each player stands in the right corner of the room, depending on their view.
- Discuss the four different viewpoints.
Besides games, these interactive multimedia presentation examples can also lighten your next talks.
Word cloud is always a beautiful addition to any interactive presentation. If you want our advice, include them whenever you can - presentation games or not.
If you do plan to use one for a game in your presentation, a great one to try is Obscure Word Cloud .
It works on the same concept as the popular UK game show Pointless . Your players are given a statement and have to name the most obscure answer they can. The least-mentioned correct answer is the winner!
Take this example statement:
Name one of our top 10 countries for customer satisfaction.
The most popular answers may be India, USA and Brazil , but the points go to the least mentioned correct country.
- Create a word cloud slide with your statement at the top.
- Players submit the most obscure answer they can think of.
- The most obscure one appears most diminutive on the board. Whoever submitted that answer is the winner!
Word Clouds for Every Presentation
Get these word cloud templates when you sign up for free with AhaSlides!
For Ice Breaking
For Testing
This one's a great game to use in the classroom, but if you're not looking for students' games for presentation, it also works wonders in a casual work setting.
Heart, Gun, Bomb is a game in which teams take turns to answer questions presented in a grid. If they get an answer right, they either get a heart, a gun or a bomb...
- A ❤️ grants the team an extra life.
- A 🔫 takes away one life from any other team.
- A 💣 takes away one heart from the team who got it.
All teams start with five hearts. The team with the most hearts at the end, or the only surviving team, is the winner!
- Before starting, create a grid table for yourself with either a heart, gun or bomb occupying each grid (on a 5x5 grid, this should be 12 hearts, nine guns and four bombs).
- Present another grid table to your players (5x5 for two teams, 6x6 for three groups, etc.)
- Write a figure stat (like 25%) from your presentation into each grid.
- Split players into the desired number of teams.
- Team 1 chooses a grid and says the meaning behind the number ( for example, the number of customers last quarter ).
- If they're wrong, they lose a heart. If they're right, they get either a seat, gun or bomb, depending on what the grid corresponds to on your grid table.
- Repeat this with all the teams until there's a winner!
👉 Get more interactive presentation ideas from AhaSlides.
#9: Match Up - Interactive Presentation Games
Here's another quiz-type question that can be a great addition to your roster of interactive activities for presentations.
It involves a set of prompt statements and a set of answers. Each group is jumbled; the players must match the information with the correct answer as quickly as possible.
Again, this one works well when the answers are numbers and figures.
- Create a 'Match Pairs' question.
- Fill out the set of prompts and answers, which will automatically shuffle.
- Players match each prompt with its answer as fast as possible to score the most points.
If there's a more versatile presentation game tool than the humble spinner wheel , we aren't aware of it.
Adding the random factor of a spinner wheel might be just what you need to keep engagement in your presentation high. There are presentation games you can use with this, including...
- Choosing a random participant to answer a question.
- Choose a bonus prize after getting the correct answer.
- Choosing the next person to ask a Q&A question or give a presentation.
- Create a spinner wheel slide and write the title at the top.
- Write the entries for the spinner wheel.
- Spin the wheel and see where it lands!
Tip 💡 You can choose the AhaSlides spinner wheel to use your participants' names, so you don't have to fill in the entries manually! Learn more interactive presentation techniques with AhaSlides.
This one's a great way to turn a regular end-of-presentation feature into a fun, engaging game.
It's got all the hallmarks of a standard Q&A, but this time, all the questions are written on balloons.
It's a super simple one to set up and play, but you'll see how motivated participants are to ask questions when it involves balloons!
- Hand out a deflated balloon and a Sharpie to each participant.
- Each participant blows up the balloon and writes their question on it.
- Each participant bats their balloon to where the speaker is standing.
- The speaker answers the question and then pops or throws away the balloon.
🎉 Tips: Try the best Q&A apps to engage with your audience
So, how do you feel about AhaSlides's interactive ideas for presentations? Being by far the most popular presentation tool on the planet, you may want to know if there are any presentation games to play on PowerPoint.
Unfortunately, the answer is no. PowerPoint takes presentations incredibly seriously and doesn't have a lot of time for interactivity or fun of any kind.
But there's good news...
It is possible to directly embed presentation games into PowerPoint presentations with free help from AhaSlides.
You can import your PowerPoint presentation to AhaSlides with the click of a button and vice versa , then place interactive presentation games like the ones above directly between your presentation slides.
💡 PowerPoint presentation games in less than 5 minutes ? Check the video below or our quick tutorial here to find out how!
Or, you can also build your interactive slides with AhaSlides directly on PowerPoint with the AhaSlides add-in ! Super simple:
What are the benefits of playing interactive presentation games?
Interactive games to play during a presentation can boost engagement, participation and knowledge retention. They turn passive listeners into active learners by incorporating elements like live polls , idea boards , quizzes, word clouds and Q&A .
How do you make a presentation interactive with games?
- Match your content: The game should reinforce the topics being covered, not just be random entertainment. - Audience considerations: Age, group size, and knowledge level will inform game complexity. - Tech tools & time: Consider similar games to Kahoot , etc., or design simple no-tech games based on the time you have. - Utilise appropriate questions, including icebreaker game questions or general knowledge quiz questions .
How can I make my presentation more engaging?
Making presentations more engaging can be a challenge, but there are several techniques you can use to make your presentation more interesting and memorable, including (1) starting with a strong opening (2) using lots of visual ads and (3) telling an attractive story. Also, remember to keep it short and sweet, and of course, practice a lot!
Lawrence Haywood
Former ESL teacher and quiz master converted to the wild slide. Now a content creator, traveller, musician and big time slider preaching the good word of interactivity.
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