Fast, Curious, and Growing: How to Use the Fast and Curious EduProtocol With Wayground

Check out my "class" photo of some of my students' avatars!

Monday morning. Students are shuffling in. The weekend is not quite over for anyone in the room, including you.

Here is a routine that takes fifteen minutes, requires almost no prep once you have set it up, and will produce some of the most visible evidence of student growth you have ever seen in a classroom.

It is called the Fast and Curious. Pairing it with Wayground might be the most satisfying thing you do all week.

What Is an EduProtocol?

Before we get into the specifics, a thirty-second orientation for anyone who has not encountered EduProtocols before.

EduProtocols are structured, flexible lesson frameworks or "lesson frames," designed to make classroom instruction more engaging, efficient, and effective. They were created by Jon Corippo and Marlena Hebern, both former educators and leaders in educational technology. Instead of being specific lesson plans for particular topics, EduProtocols are repeatable activity templates that teachers can use across grade levels and subject areas.

Think of them as the container rather than the content. The container stays the same every week. The content changes. Students learn the routine once and then the cognitive load of "what are we doing today" disappears, which frees up mental energy for the actual learning.

EduProtocols have risen in popularity in the past few years, aiming to foster a supportive and close-knit environment between teachers and students by presenting versatile hands-on lesson plans that can easily be adjusted to teach any content using the same framework. Steve Dull offers an amazing breakdown of Eduprotocols on his website!

There are dozens of EduProtocols. The Fast and Curious is the one that has a way of making teachers gasp at the data by Wednesday.

What Is the Fast and Curious?

The Fast and the Curious is one of the most popular EduProtocols, especially for building fluency with facts, vocabulary, or quick recall skills. It is a high-energy, short-cycle review protocol that helps students learn fast and keeps them motivated by treating practice like a game.

The structure is beautifully simple. While this EduProtocol takes five class days total, and ideally should start at the beginning of the school week, it only uses fifteen minutes of your time each day.

Here is how it works across a week:

Day 1 — The Cold Start. 

Students take a quiz on content they have not formally studied yet. No instruction beforehand. No study guide. Just the questions. The score they get on Day 1 is their baseline, and for most students it is not pretty. That is the point. The low score is not a failure. It is the starting line.

Day 2 — The First Repetition. 

Students take the same quiz again. Before they do, you review the answers from Day 1 together, quickly, not exhaustively. Students correct their understanding. Then they play again. You want to reinforce the newly corrected answers and let the information sink into students' minds while it is still fresh in their memories. The scores go up....They always go up.

Days 3 and 4 — The Build. 

Same quiz. More repetitions. The class average climbs. Individual students watch their own scores improve in real time. With each practice round, students can see their progress and measure it against other practice rounds that day as well as on previous days. The improvement is tangible, and it motivates them to keep going.

Day 5 — The Payoff. 

If the class scores 100% the first time, you are done. Students who score 100% the first time earn that as the final score. If the class hits 95% or better, Day 5 is a free day. If not, it is a buffer day for reteaching whatever the data says needs attention.

(You can also check out my man Adam Juarez's breakdown of the Fast and Curious on his website!)

I have used this protocol at both the middle and high school level and watched the same thing happen every time: students who started Day 1 at 30% are hitting 85% or better by Day 4. And more importantly, something shifts in how they relate to their own learning. They start to believe the score can go up. That belief is worth more than any single quiz result!

Why Wayground Is the Perfect Partner

You can run Fast and Curious with almost any formative assessment tool. But Wayground, which longtime educators will recognize as the significantly expanded and rebranded Quizizz, is the tool that makes the protocol sing.

Along with tracking individual scores, Wayground monitors class mastery percentages, which are a powerful motivator and community-builder for the class. That class-level data point is what turns Fast and Curious from an individual retrieval exercise into a collective project. Students are not just trying to beat their own score. They are watching the class average climb together. They start rooting for each other. The culture shifts in ways that are difficult to manufacture through any other means.

Secondary science teacher Ariana Hernandez of Hesperia Unified School District once saw her students soar from 54% to 97% within one week. "You're going to watch the class average grow and grow," she explained. "Nobody's cheating. All week, they're helping each other out, they're rooting for each other, and you're really building that culture." Her students even told her after their state science test that the content felt easy, because they had already seen it so many times it had moved into long-term memory.

That is not an outlier. That is what the protocol produces when the conditions are right.

Beyond the aggregate data, Wayground gives you question-level insight: which specific questions are tripping up which students, in real time, before the week is over. When looking at the results, you may notice some data points are similar. If all students are struggling with a concept, you can spend that time reviewing and providing a mini-lesson. This is data-driven instruction at its best. Solving the challenge in the moment.

Wayground also deserves a specific mention for its accessibility features: text-to-speech support, adjustable font sizes, and multiple language options that make the quiz experience more equitable for English language learners and students with reading differences. The protocol works best when every student can actually access the content. Wayground makes that significantly easier to guarantee.

Setting It Up

The setup is lighter than it sounds. Here is the quick version:

Create a question set in Wayground on the content you want students to master: vocabulary terms, key events, dates, concepts, whatever the week's essential knowledge is. Ten to fifteen questions is the sweet spot. Add images where you can; visual anchors strengthen recall and help students who process information differently.

Run it as a live game Monday morning. Pull up the class data immediately after. Go over the answers together. Run it again. That is Day 1 and the beginning of Day 2 in the same fifteen-minute window if you move efficiently.

Set the expectation from the start: the score will go up. Show students their Day 1 baseline. Tell them to screenshot it. By Friday, they will want to screenshot the comparison.

The Growth Mindset You Did Not Plan to Teach

Here is the thing about Fast and Curious that you might not notice upfront.

It is not just a retrieval practice protocol. It is a slow, repeated demonstration that effort produces results. Students who have internalized the belief that they are "bad at history" or "not a test person" watch their own scores climb across a week and run out of evidence to support that story.

The Fast and Curious EduProtocol is entirely predictable in any class setting when the conditions are all met. It rewards and celebrates improvement. The improvement is tangible, and it motivates students to keep going.

That is not incidental. That is the point. The quiz is the vehicle. The growth mindset is the destination.

Fifteen minutes a day. Five days. Start on Monday.

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Additional Helpful Resources

The EduProtocol Field Guide by Jon Corippo and Marlena Hebern:🔗 https://www.amazon.com/EduProtocol-Field-Guide-Lesson-Designs/dp/1946444103

Wayground (formerly Quizizz):🔗 https://wayground.com

Ditch That Textbook — Fast and Curious overview:🔗 https://ditchthattextbook.com/eliminate-worksheet-homework-with-the-fast-and-the-curious-eduprotocol/