Element Quiz Generator

I’m giving my chemistry students weekly element quizzes until they have the symbols and names of the first 36 elements memorized. I broke the first 36 elements down into three sets. Each week, my chemistry students have 12 elements and their symbols to memorize from the periodic table.

When I told my husband of my plan to write my element quizzes, he offered to help create an Excel Spreadsheet that would automatically generate random element quizzes. Of course, I took him up on his offer to create an element quiz generator!

Here’s the finished product:

Change the version letter, and the spreadsheet will automatically generate a new quiz. Not happy with the new quiz version? Hit F9 to generate a different version.

This part of the spreadsheet controls the magic.

Type in the atomic numbers that you want to quiz students through. Choose a quiz number and version letter. The spreadsheet does the rest.

For my class, we are doing four quizzes.

• Quiz 1 – Elements 1-12
• Quiz 2 – Elements 13-24
• Quiz 3 – Elements 25-36
• Quiz 4 – Elements 1-36

The spreadsheet made it super easy to generate all of these quizzes (including FOUR versions of each) in a matter of minutes. I simply hit F9 until I got a quiz version I wanted, then I selected “Microsoft Print to PDF” as my printer.

Each PDF contains a quiz and the corresponding answer key!

 Here’s what the finished element quiz looks like:

And, here’s the corresponding answer key.

Please check out my other chemistry resources for more free activities.