KaHoot!

Kahoot.com turns quizzes into trivia games where students compete against each other for the best scores to make it to the podium at the end of the game.

Gamification

Kahoot! takes the idea of a multiple-choice quiz and turns it into a trivia game by adding incentives such as a timer on each question, extra points for expedited answers, extra points for streaks of correct answers, and a leaderboard that allows you to compare your performance to other students in the class. According to Pratolo et al (2020), "the use of Kahoot! improves students' motivation and attention"(p. 86). The platform allows you to add media such as music, images, and video, creating a simple but immersive experience. The game platform is an example of what Reiser et al (2018) refers to as a drill and kill game, and although the author states that other design strategies can be just as effective at producing outcomes at lower-levels of taxonomic outcomes, the result seems to be a more actively engaged student. According to Prieto et al (2019), the use of Kahoot! "in the classroom not only improves the students’ learning process but also their participation and the positive relationship among the class members" (p.2).

Social Interdependence Theory

The leader board offers up a negative interdependence between students that would like to compete against one another. Prieto et al (2019) found that this perceived competition can discourage students that find themselves on the bottom rungs of the leader board even once. The use of nicknames that the platform autogenerates for participants can keep the player's anonymity while allowing everyone to compete. Students of a more competitive nature can share nicknames with the class and race each other for the top of the leaderboard. Plump et al (2017) found that the competition was perceived as friendly and helped students push each other's performances. It is interesting to note that both studies differing results may be due to the differences in the age and development stage of the chosen studies. Preito et al (2019) researched elementary level students while Plump et al (2017) researched adult learners. The developmental stages impact the learner take away from different courses (Yin, Y. 2015).

Stealth and self-assessment

According to Reiser et al (2018), games by their nature will produce opportunities for both stealth and self-assessment strategies. Instructors are made aware of both the individual knowledge base through assessing the evidence students create while playing the games. Questions that are regularly missed or answered incorrectly are brought to the attention of instructors in a report allowing for the rewording of the question, or the adjustment of the curriculum to best serve the student's knowledge base. Students that did not answer all the questions due to either giving up on the game or not answering a question in time will appear on the report as well. Immediate feedback is given when a student clicks on an answer, showing them if their answer is right or wrong. At the end game students are allowed to see how they stack up against other students in the class giving them insight into how well they have learned the subject matter. As the assessment comes in the form of a game, students take the leaderboard as motivation to master the subject matter rather than the end result of their learning process as a test would (Prieto, M. 2019).

Self-guided learning

"Self-efficacy refers to people’s confidence in their ability to master a task" (Lee, P. 2019). If the purpose of education is to gain the ability to understand and complete tasks, then the purpose of education should be to support and increase learners' self-efficacy in the topics of study. Lee's (2019) study also led to the conclusion that competition increases self-efficacy through motivation by a significant amount when compared to skills taught without competition. This shows that introducing games with a competitive goal increases the motivation for learners to guide themselves through concepts they are struggling with within the learning process. Abakumova et al(2016) found that technologies including games initiate various psychological mechanisms beyond competitive motivations that excite cognitive interests and processes which in turn develop independent activity skills. The study goes on to find that these skills transform the students into having a higher level of self-guided activity. This not only serves the students in creating their own strategies for education but also enables teachers to focus their guidance even in larger class sizes.

References

Abakumova, I. V., Bakaeva, I. A., & Kolesina, K. Y. (2016). Technologies of Initiating Students into Independent (Self-Guided) Activity in Supplementary Distance Learning. International Journal of Cognitive Research in Science, Engineering & Education (IJCRSEE), 4(2), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.5937/IJCRSEE1602001A

Lee, P. T. Y., Lui, R. W. C., & Chau, M. (2019). How Does Competition Help Future Learning in Serious Games? An Exploratory Study in Learning Search Engine Optimization. Journal of Information Systems Education, 30(3), 167–177.

Plump, C. M., & Larosa, J. (2017). Using Kahoot! in the Classroom to Create Engagement and Active Learning: A Game-Based Technology Solution for eLearning Novices. Management Teaching Review, 2(2), 151–158. doi :10.1177/2379298116689783

Pratolo, H., & Rondiyah, B. W.. (2020). Interactive game “Kahoot!” as the media of students’ vocabulary assessment. Journal on English as a Foreign Language, 10(1), 84-102. https://doi.org/10.23971/jefl.v10i1.1670

Prieto, M. Palma, L. Tobías, P. & León, F. (2019). Student Assessment of the Use of Kahoot in the Learning Process of Science and Mathematics. Education Sciences, 9(1), 55. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci9010055

Reiser, R. A., & Dempsey, J. V. (2018). Trends and issues in instructional design and technology. New York, NY: Pearson.

Yin, Y., Adams, C., Goble, E., & Francisco Vargas Madriz, L. (2015). A classroom at home: children and the lived world of MOOCs. Educational Media International, 52(2), 88–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/09523987.2015.1053287