GMC News
GMC highlights Critical Thinking through “Quality Enhancement Plan”
On September 14, 2016, Georgia Military College’s (GMC) Milledgeville Campus hosted a CLUE Mystery game to kick-off GMC’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP). The topic for GMC’s QEP is Critical Thinking where students will use five reasoning skills (Infer/Induce, Deduce, Evaluate and Analyze), known as IDEA, to think critically. The QEP topic is one that has been in development for the past two years and is important to student learning.
The QEP CLUE Mystery game, developed and organized by Academic Dean Laura Booth and faculty member Erin McDade, was an adaptation of the traditional CLUE board game. The goal was to be the first to determine who committed the crime, with what weapon, and where the crime took place. To solve this mystery, students formed teams of two or three and began with a general question about GMC’s Quality Enhancement Plan and were directed to bring their answer to one of 13 different checkpoints.
At each checkpoint, a professor was ready to check the teams’ answer and if correct, provide the team with another envelope containing a clue and another question. Each question used in the game was developed by faculty from each of their disciplines and designed to promote critical thinking. As the teams answered the questions they were slowly able to eliminate suspects, locations and weapons from the list.
The faculty were instrumental in the success of the game by developing strong critical thinking questions and allowing for their classrooms to be checkpoints throughout the game. Amy Zipperer provided outstanding decorations for the game with the help of GMC’s Student Ambassadors. Mark Fairbrass and Amy Zipperer also provided dramatic effect at the reveal when they acted out the crime students were attempting to solve.
The QEP Mascot is an owl and participants had the opportunity to vote for a name. After a vote, the mascot was named “Quibly the Owl” provided by GMC student Christen Brown.
First place winners received a $50 Walmart gift card and a $25 GMC bookstore voucher. Second place
winners received a $25 Walmart gift card and a $15 GMC bookstore voucher while the third place
winners received a $15 Walmart gift card and a $10 GMC bookstore voucher.
