Wheel of fortune maker

Write an outcome on every segment — names, tasks, prizes, review questions — and the wheel decides. Each segment gets its own colour, and the preview beside you is what players will spin.

Each spin only picks from the segments that have come up least often, so a class works through every name before the first one comes round again.

Give a segment a picture and the wheel draws it inside the slice. A sound clip or a link shows up on the card the winner is handed instead.

Give each segment a size and the wheel divides itself by them — a bigger slice is that much likelier to come up, which is how you make a prize rare.

Mark the segments worth celebrating and confetti goes off in your theme colours whenever the wheel lands on one.

Instead of a colour per segment, paint the wheel in your primary and secondary colour in turn — the quickest way to a wheel that matches everything else you have made.

The slices stay blank, before and after the spin. The one it lands on is outlined in gold, so everybody sees where it stopped and only you know what it means.

The winning segment opens in a dialog over the wheel, big enough to read from the back of the room, instead of sitting on the card beside it.

A spin makes between eight and twelve full turns by default and takes seven seconds. Set an exact number of turns, or a longer spin, when the suspense is the point.

A wooden tick sounds each time a segment passes the pointer. Lovely in a classroom, less so in a library — it can be switched off.

Completion becomes the share of segments that have come up, so the activity is only finished once the wheel has been through all of them.

A wheel somebody already built, spun the way your players will spin yours.