A Novel Gamification Application for High School Student Examination and Assessment to Assist Student Engagement and to Stimulate Interest

Abstract

Formal education in high school focuses primarily on knowledge acquisition via traditional classroom teaching. Younger generations of students tend to lose interest and to disengage from the process. Gamification, the use of gaming elements in the training process to stimulate interest, has been used lately to battle this phenomenon. The use of an interactive environment and the employment of tools familiar to today’s students aim to bring the student closer to the learning process. Even though there have been several attempts to integrate gaming elements in the teaching process, few applications in the student assessment procedure have been reported so far. In this article, a new approach to student assessment is implemented using a gamified quiz as opposed to standard exam formats, where students are asked to answer questions on the material already taught, using various gaming elements (leaderboards, rewards at different levels, etc.). The results show that students are much more interested in this interactive process and would like to see this kind of performance assessment more often in their everyday activity in school. The participants are also motivated to learn more about the subject of the course and are generally satisfied with this novel approach compared to standard forms of exams.