This is an activity I made a couple of years ago and have used several times with my younger students, overall to much success. I finally decided to take the time to upload it (even though I feel I could do more to flesh it out). I hope others can use it as well!
The upload is one that I use with my 3rd grade elementary school students, usually near the end of the year. But it should be easy enough to edit for other purposes or lessons.
Summary
Students play as Mario and/or Bowser, taking turns answering a series of questions. If they are correct, then they attack their opponent and reduce their health. The instructions on how to navigate the activity are laid out within the PowerPoint in a couple of hidden slides at the beginning. I recommend messing around with it on your own for a minute so that you're comfortable with all the interactive items.
Classroom Use
Depending on the classroom I vary how I progress through the rounds. Usually I split the classroom into two teams, one playing as Mario and the other as Bowser. They Janken on who goes first and I alternate. If a team can't answer a question then the other team has a chance to steal the round. If neither team can answer then I have both teams lose health (Both to keep the time on track and otherwise there might not be enough slides for questions). I've also done it where each team has one member Janken before each round, and the winner has the first chance to answer (But i had a situation where one team won all the Janken rounds so I stopped doing it this way).
Final Thoughts
To address some shortcomings I feel this activity has. The activity is only one "round" because I've mostly used it at the end of a lesson when time usually short. I wanted to add other rounds with different characters, but never mustered up the motivation to add more animations. Lastly, I never got around to adding any sound to the activity, because it ended up never mattering for me. My students seemed to have a ton of fun as it was so I left it as-is.
Resource Attribution
The character sprites are by DerekminyA on deviantart, I just animated them.
Wow, I love the animations on the sprites! I have no idea how you would even go about doing that, did you animate them in ppt or through a 3rd party application?
@Metapod, I used a third party tool to create individual animations (e.g. standing, walking, etc). I then exported them as .gif files and put them togething in ppt to make the sequences.
Amazing! I am going to adapt the questions for JHS and use it for a short review! Many thanks.
Fantastic! please muster up some energy to add more characters and rounds. well made