Review Games Work!
TRASHKETBALL™
Style: Fast-paced team quiz game
Teams: 3 or more
Questions: 20 Q&A
Format: Google Slides (Works in PowerPoint)
- Teams race to answer each question.
- 1st correct: 3 shots · 2nd: 2 shots · All other correct teams: 1 shot.
- For every shot, students choose their position: 1 point (close) · 2 points (middle) · 3 points (far)
- Wrong answer: No shots
- Teams decide whether to play it safe or risk a harder shot for more points.
Why students love it: Fast competition, strategy, and the chance to turn every correct answer into points for their team.
The BIG TERRIBLE Game
Style: Unpredictable team quiz game
Teams: Up to 8
Questions: 20 Q&A
Format: PowerPoint (Works in Google Slides)
- Every team answers every question.
- After each question, choose A, B, C or D to reveal a different set of points for every team.
- Points can be positive or negative.
- Correct answer: Add the revealed points to the team’s score.
- Wrong answer: Add the opposite of the revealed points.
- Closest to zero wins.
Why students love it: The scoring is completely UNFAIR—wild swings, lucky breaks and terrible surprises mean nobody knows who’s going to win until the very end.
Review Games Work!
Research shows that review games in the classroom increase test scores and student retention. Check out our Research Page to see some of the published academic articles on the subject.
Meet Cindy
I’m a retired teacher with 15 years of classroom experience from Victoria, Canada.
I hold a Master’s in Curriculum Development & Instruction, a Bachelor of Education, and a Bachelor of Arts.
Review can be boring. Students tune out, teachers struggle to keep them engaged, and nobody gets excited about another worksheet. I wanted to change that.
I spent years developing about 12,000 curriculum-based question sets, covering every topic across Grade 3–12 subjects. They’re designed specifically for classroom review, helping students use and apply what they’ve learned rather than simply recall it.
I then developed the games with my husband, an economist with a background in game theory. We designed them around fun, engaging gameplay and creative scoring systems that hold students’ attention and make review something they’re begging to do again.
From Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) to Cindy's Classroom Games
It started in 2023, shortly after retirement, with an idea: what if review could become one of the most engaging parts of learning? Over the years, I built an archive of more than 12,000 sets of curriculum-based questions covering subjects from Grades 3-12. The questions were designed to encourage students to use and apply what they had learned, rather than simply recall facts.
Review seemed like the perfect place to put those questions to work. For teachers, review can be time-consuming to prepare. For students, it can quickly become repetitive. Yet it is also a valuable opportunity for students to apply the curriculum, discover what they understand, and strengthen what they don't — before the test. Classroom games offered a way to make that process active, competitive, and fun.
The first games were offered on Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) as a testing ground. In total, 28 different classroom game designs were created and tested. Months of sales, classroom use, and teacher feedback helped identify the eight games teachers and students responded to best. Those eight were refined further, and the growing library of 12,000+ question sets could then be paired with each game — creating an enormous selection of ready-to-play classroom review games.
The collection eventually became so large that a single TPT store was no longer practical. Separate Cindy's Classroom Games stores were created for different school levels and subjects, reaching 21 stores and 62,000 products on Teachers Pay Teachers at the peak. That made finding the right resources easier, but managing such a large catalog through individual marketplace listings became increasingly limiting.
So the next chapter began. Cindy's Classroom Games became its own dedicated store, built from the ground up around classroom review games and designed to make a massive curriculum-based catalog easier for teachers to explore. What began as a retirement side project and an experiment on Teachers Pay Teachers has grown into something much bigger — and we're only getting started.
