UTILIZING GAMIFICATION IN MATHEMATICS COURSES FOR ENGINEERS TO PROMOTE LEARNING

Studies have shown that gamification facilitates students’ interest, enjoyment and continuous involvement, allows students to make mistakes anonymously and triggers debates about answers, thus gamification increases students’ engagement. In addition, most students respond positively to using online quizzes during the lesson, the main criticism being the short time allowed for each question (Bullón et al., 2018). We examine two aspects of the use of Kahoot! online quizzes in three mathematics courses, taught to two groups of first year Israeli engineering students: (1) the effect of using Kahoot! quizzes on students’ learning outcomes in two questions of the mid-term exams (comparing between traditional teaching and teaching using Kahoot! quiz), and (2) students’ learning experience. Our findings indicate that in all three courses most of the students did not know how to solve the two questions, neither if the question was taught traditionally nor if it was discussed during the Kahoot! lesson. However, in one course (Algebra), students’ success was similar in the two groups, which may suggest that using the Kahoot! quiz was effective at least as the traditional teaching method. Overall, it is not currently clear whether using the Kahoot! quiz has effects on students’ achievements. Regarding students’ learning experience, our analysis demonstrates that students greatly favor using online quizzes as they feel it deepens their understanding and improves their ability to discuss the taught material. Moreover, the lecturers reported that the use of Kahoot! enabled them to review subjects that were taught in the course in an engaging and insightful way, caused a positive change in classroom dynamics and fostered a vivid classroom discussion, addressing issues that otherwise would have remained hidden.