Enhancing Learning and Engagement through Gamification of Student Response Systems

Abstract

Abstract Structuring classroom activities around games has been shown to increase student motivation and enjoyment. Less work has been done evaluating whether gamification benefits students in the particular context of a student response system (SRS). This evidence-based practice paper compares two SRSs, SurveyMonkey and Kahoot, to quantify the added value of gamification in enhancing student engagement during in-class problem sessions in a numerical methods course for biomedical engineering undergraduates. Students reported that both the traditional and gamified systems encouraged collaboration and made them more likely to complete the problems and to achieve the correct answer than if there had been no SRS. The gamified response system, however, resulted in significantly higher student motivation, enjoyment, and encouragement to collaborate than the non-gamified version. Students also indicated that gamification helped increase learning during the problem session, although it did not make them significantly more likely to complete the problems and achieve the correct answers. Our results suggest that by enhancing aesthetics and letting students compete as teams, gamification can boost the appeal and efficacy of SRSs.