By Mr Hull's Movie Guides
Watch the Trailer
What's Inside the Guide
This is a 14-page classroom-ready resource.
Three differentiated sets of chronological comprehension questions. Answer keys are included for all three sets.
- 40 full sentence question set.
- 30 full sentence question set (10 removed for differentiation).
- 30 multiple choice question set with 3 possible answers each. The multiple choice set works well for ESL and ELL students.
- A 9 scene storyboard of what they consider the most important moments in the movie, with a brief description for each scene.
- A synopsis of the movie, written using their storyboard as a guide.
Students work in pairs to answer 5 critical thinking questions connecting Tron to technology, then come together as a class to discuss and debate their answers. Example answers are included.
Why Watch This Movie With Your Students
Here's what your students naturally take away from the movie, whether through themes, values, ideas, or perspectives.
💻 Puts a computer system on screen as a physical, navigable world. Tron represents programs, security systems, and data as characters and places students can see, which gives an early and unusually literal picture of how a mainframe computer operates. It is a way into abstract computing concepts that most movies never attempt.
⚖️ Centers a plot about stolen work and corporate credit. Kevin Flynn was fired after a colleague, Ed Dillinger, took his video game and passed it off as his own to climb the company. That premise gives students a clear, concrete case of intellectual property theft and workplace power imbalance to think about.
🤖 Raises the question of who is really in control of a system. The Master Control Program starts as a tool and grows into an entity that seizes authority over the company's mainframe and the people who depend on it. Students can consider what happens when a system built to serve people begins acting on its own priorities instead.
🎮 Turns competition and games into a matter of survival. Flynn and the other captured programs are forced to compete in gladiatorial contests for the MCP's entertainment, with real consequences for losing. It reframes the arcade and video game aesthetic of the story into something with actual stakes for the characters trapped inside it.
🎨 Marks a genuine turning point in how movies are made. Tron was one of the first films to use extensive computer generated imagery, at a time when major studios and even the Academy were still unsure whether to treat it as legitimate filmmaking. Students get a firsthand look at a technology now standard across the entire industry, at the exact moment it was new and contested.
🤝 Builds its story around trust between a human and the systems he relies on. Flynn has to work with Tron, a security program he does not fully understand, to find a way out of a world built on rules he cannot always predict. Their partnership gives students a way to think about cooperation under pressure, even between very different kinds of allies.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated PG.
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- The movie includes stylized action violence, including a light cycle duel and combat sequences styled after video games.
- A small number of mild instances of language occur, including a few uses of "damn" and one use of "bugger."
- There is no drinking, drug use, or smoking in the movie.
📋 A free editable parent permission slip is available for this movie. It explains the educational benefits of watching movies in class and includes a space for parental consent. → Download Free Permission Slip on TpT (Free resource)
Note for educators: Movie details and age ratings in this post are sourced from IMDb, Common Sense Media, and Wikipedia to help ensure accuracy.
How My Movie Guide Helps You Teach It
Click your subject below to see how this guide supports it:
📚 English Language Arts Teachers
🗣️ ESL and ELL Teachers
🎬 Substitute Teachers and Cover Lessons
🏠 Homeschool Parents
💻 Technology Teachers
🔭 STEM Teachers
🌟 Supporting All Learners A movie gives students a story to follow, and the guide gives them questions to work through as they watch. For students with autism, learning difficulties, and mild to severe disabilities, that combination provides a clear focus for the lesson and a concrete way to show understanding. The format can be useful in special education and learning support classrooms, where teachers need activities that give students a defined task during viewing. Find out more about why movies work for diverse learners.
How These Guides Work: From Movie to Lesson
Watching a movie is not a break from learning. It reaches students through sight, sound, and story at once, engaging the brain in ways text alone does not, and the structured work around it is what turns the viewing into a genuine lesson. You can read the research behind this on the Why Movies Work page.
- A Teacher Notes and General Directions page opens the guide with a brief overview of everything inside: what the movie is about, then each part of the guide in order with a short description of what it entails. You know what to expect from the whole resource before you hand out a single page, so you can pick up the guide cold and teach it the same day.
- Answer keys are included for the comprehension question sets, so grading is quick and you are not rewatching the movie to check answers. Some guides also include example answers for the creative and written activities.
- Print and go: classroom ready, with no additional preparation needed. Print one the morning you need it and the lesson is ready.
- Substitute and first-timer friendly. A guide can be handed to a substitute or picked up by a teacher covering the topic for the first time. Nobody running the session needs to have seen the movie.
- Differentiated comprehension sets. Most guides include two or three question sets at different difficulty levels, and most include a multiple-choice option that works well for ESL and ELL students. One class set covers your strongest readers, your strugglers, and your language learners without separate prep.
- Activities that go beyond recall. Each guide includes structured activities that ask students to engage with the movie, not just watch it, ranging from creative and written tasks to discussion and critical thinking questions depending on the guide. That variety matters in a mixed classroom: a student who freezes on a written question set may show real understanding through a drawing or a creative task, and a confident writer gets room to go beyond recall. For the teacher, it turns a movie session into work you can grade: comprehension questions show whether students followed the plot, and the activities beyond them show whether they understood it.
