How to Build and Use PowerPoint Flip Book Games

Today I will share how to build and use PowerPoint flip book games. First, I must explain what I mean by the PowerPoint flip book game. This is a type of presentation that automatically changes slides every second. This gives the impression that the slides are flipping, like when you are flipping through the pages of a book.

PowerPoint flip book games can be fun and useful tools if used sparingly. Because they flip through the slides very fast, they are great when you want to create some randomness in your class so that the students don’t all give the same answers.

How to play

Open the flip book presentation you want to use and click the start slide show button. The images will whizz past. To stop and start the presentation, follow these steps.

1. Start presentation. The images should change every second.
2. To stop, press either the up or left arrow key.
3. To restart it cycling through images again. Press either the down or right arrow key.
4. To exit the presentation, press escape.

Teaching Ideas

This fun and simple activity can help your students practice their vocabulary. The images flip quickly, creating a random question-and-answer effect that can be great for classes where students tend to repeat what the last student said. You can start the presentation, and your students can tell you when to stop.

Reviewing Keywords and phrases

Create a slide deck that contains all the words and phrases needed for your class. Each student can take turns telling you when to stop the presentation. The student should say that phrase or word on whichever slide the presentation stops.

Suppose you are teaching about zoo animals and have a slide deck with around 15 animals. The deck stops on an image of an elephant. The student could say something like “I can see elephants in the zoo” or “It’s an elephant” It depends on your material and the level of your students.

Questions and Answers

Set up the slides in the presentation to be questioned for your material. This can then be used as a way for the students to practice answering different types of questions and to review questions and answers from past material.

Another version of this could be to have answer sentences on the presentation; the students would need to create the questions for those answers.

Random Generator

You can build one of these flip book-style presentations with numbers for each slide when you play the presentation and stop it. You should get a random number.

You can build your only random number generator using one of these PowerPoint flip book games. I will show you how to do this later.

Create a slide deck with the numbers or letters you want to use. For letters of the alphabet, whichever letter it stops on, the students need to tell you something that begins with that letter. For numbers, it could be how many times the student needs to do something, the number of items they need to pretend to have, or things they want to buy “I want to buy 20 bananas, ” or how many siblings they have “I have ten sisters”. These are funny answers and get the kids to speak and play with language.

How are you?

Build a version with all the feelings, words or emotions. Run the presentation to get different answers from the students.

Now I have given you some ideas on using PowerPoint flip book games in your class. I would love to hear how you are using it, so feel free to comment below.

Now let’s build one together.

How to build one

The great thing with PowerPoint is that once you have built your first PowerPoint flip book game, you can change the slides to fit the needs of your next class.

I recommended having 10-20 slides to ensure your presentation is effective. For this example, let’s use numbers from one to twenty. Here are the steps you can follow:

1. Open PowerPoint and start a new presentation.
2. Create your first slide.
3. Go to the Transitions tab.
4. Tick the box that says After and set it to 1:00.
5. Click on the slideshow tab.
6. Select Set Up Slide Show.
7. Choose Loop continuously until “Esc”
8. Add the rest of your pages, and you are done.

For slide decks that consist solely of numbers or letters, mixing up the slides to make them feel more random is a good idea.