Hopla for teachers

Three steps

1. Open hoplagames.com on the classroom computer in Chrome or Edge (Safari works too) and put it on the projector or the board. No account and no install — the school laptop's own webcam is enough.
2. Aim the webcam at a clear spot 2-3 metres in front of it, so only the players are in the picture — a bare wall at the side of the room works best. Allow the camera when the game asks.
3. Two kids step up and play a one-minute round side by side while the rest of the class does the same moves from their places. Next round, next two.

Why it works with a class

Two players are a team, never rivals: they share one score, each on their own rank, and points are never deducted, so a confident kid and a shy one can step up together and both walk back to their seats having helped. Rookie is built for a four-year-old and Master pushes a 12- to 14-year-old, so the same games work from kindergarten to middle school. Before every round a short wordless demo shows the move, which helps a child who cannot read yet or does not speak the class language.

A round is about a minute. Three or four rounds make a brain break between two lessons (more in brain break games for the classroom); five make the five-minute warm-up at the start of PE; and a calm-down routine closes a lively lesson.

Six games that work with a whole class

• Freeze Dance — dance while the music plays, freeze when it stops. The whole room can play along.
• Jump & Duck — jump the bamboo bundles, duck the swinging poles. Heart rate up in a minute.
• Paper Wall — make the shape of the hole before the paper wall arrives; the class makes the shape too.
• Fire Path — run on the spot, jump the logs, duck the gates, step aside from the sandbags.
• Power Smash — burst straw targets with fast punches and knee lifts.
• Board Break — step to the mat, lift a hand high and chop the board.

For the school's privacy questions

The camera image is processed inside the browser on that computer and never leaves it: it is not uploaded, recorded or stored, and there is no server that could receive it. Students never sign in, and nothing that identifies them is collected — no name, no email, no photo. Check your school's policy on webcams in class: nothing is recorded, and only the players need to be in view. The site counts visits as anonymous totals, with no cookies and no identifiers; the privacy page has all of it. If the school network filters websites, ask IT to allow hoplagames.com, cdn.jsdelivr.net and storage.googleapis.com — the last two serve the body-tracking model that runs in the browser.

All 35 games are free. 29 play straight away; the six Moon Temple games open with a free parent account, which a class does not need.