IPA Jeopardy and IPA Hangman

I just came across the instructions for IPA Jeopardy in a poster about the Summer Linguistic Institute for Youth Scholars (SLIYS). Here’s the description:

Lesson: A 2-part introduction to articulatory phonetics, first tackling consonants, then vowels.
Activity: IPA Jeopardy
Students are organized into“teams” of 4-5 students, each with pen and paper.
On the screen appear English words written in IPA; students race to “decode” the words and raise their hands when they know the answer.
To be awarded the points for that word, the students must properly describe — using linguistic vocabulary — one of the vowels or consonants in the word, selected by the instructor.
Results:
Students learn about articulators and how to describe new sounds.
Students apply knowledge by asking language consultants about the sound inventories in their language.
Easily adaptable to various languages; possible to integrate discussion of typology

For a harder version, you could also put up the words in standard orthography and have students write the IPA transcription.

This game actually reminds me that I also played IPA hangman a few times in undergrad. The gameplay is very similar to regular hangman, but I’d suggest using a model for the hanging figure that contains more body parts than typical, because there are more English IPA symbols than English alphabetic symbols so it’s more difficult to guess. (It’s interesting how what a good guess is changes in IPA: “z” is a very unlikely letter but /z/ is actually fairly common as a phoneme.)

It’s also very important that the person making the hidden word/sentence gets their IPA transcription right and is consistent about marking it, so you might want to play with two people in charge of the clue and have them write it out on a small hidden slip of paper to refer to when filling in the blanks. I’d recommend using a very broad transcription to minimize the number of symbols you have in the guessing space – including flap and barred i, for example, will make things even more difficult, and I’m not sure how you’d represent diacritics.

Previously about SLIYS. Previous IPA-learning games: IPA Bingo and IPA Scrabble.