Fun and Engagement in Lecture Halls through Social Gamification

Abstract

The traditional lecture is a teaching format which offers students few opportunities for engagement turning them into passive listeners of the lecturers’ presentations what negatively impacts on their learning. With audience response systems, that is technology supporting classroom quizzes, breaks which reactivate the students can be introduced into the lecturers’ presentations. This article reports on an audience response system coupled with a social gamification of quizzes based on teams: Each student is assigned to a team and the students’ answers to quizzes contribute to their team’s success. An immediate overview of team participation updated in real-time during the quiz and updated team standings after the quiz displayed for everyone to see motivate students to participate in the quizzes. The contribution of this article is threefold: First, a team-based social gamification of quizzes aimed at boosting participation in quizzes and attendance at lectures, second, original technological tools supporting the proposed team-based social gamification, and third, a first evaluation demonstrating its effectiveness in a small course and a second evaluation suggesting that for use in large classes teams have to be built in a specific way. This article is an extended version of an article presented at ICL 2018 which provides a deeper representation of related work, a more extensive description of the team component, an additional evaluation, and implications for the use of the team-based social gamification in large classes.