Motivating students to keep up the learning can be difficult as the end of the school year approaches!  This week I used the old “make it a game” trick to engage students in their physics lesson.  The game Block Head! is a simple block stacking game which can be used to teach the concepts of forces, motion, and center of gravity.  We begin by playing a round of Block Head! while writing observations in our lab notebooks.  The goals is to develop the super-secret-winning-strategy for use in the upcoming tournament.  Students play the game but their moves are not well thought out and they have a hard time predicting how their choice of block will work on the stack.  To help them apply physics to the game, we stream a movie clip from Discovery Education called, “Inquiring Minds: Bodies in Motion,” which teaches the students about center of gravity.  The kids take notes, we discuss the examples, then it’s back to the game to test out what we learned!  Before long the students are making some pretty amazing stacks of blocks that seem to defy gravity!  When students see that they can apply what they have learned in class to do better in a game or in a sport, they begin to see the practical value in science.