Evaluation of Interactive and Gamified Approaches for Teaching ICT Theory - A Study of PowerPoint, Sembly, and Kahoot!

Abstract

This paper presents the experiences and results from an evaluation of using interactive and gamified approaches for teaching theory lectures in an ICT introductory course at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The course consists of two main parts: One part is an introduction to procedural programming, and the other part is a theoretical introduction to hardware, digital representation, network, and algorithms. The theory part is taught in one 45-minute lecture per week throughout the semester. Over the years, a significant challenge has been to keep the students' engagement, attention, and motivation high. In fall 2017, the five teachers in this course experimented with three different approaches for giving theory lectures to their respective groups of students. The first approach was traditional PowerPoint presentations and encouraging students to ask questions and interact verbally. The second approach was to use the classroom interaction tool Sembly, where the teacher first gave a short introduction to the topic, the students then participated in a short warmup quiz, and then they were asked to compose questions on their own using Sembly followed by a vote on which questions were the most important. Finally, the lecturer went through the slides for the lecture with the emphasis on answering the highest rated student questions. The third approach was to play a Blind kahoot (gamified approach), where the students played through several questions related to the topic using Kahoot! without any background knowledge, and the teacher provided explanations between the questions. The evaluation is based on data from observations in class, a survey where 469 students responded, a course evaluation with 363 respondents, and feedback on the Blind kahoot. The results indicate that most of the students prefer the gamified approach and that there was no difference in terms of gender. This study focuses on students' perception and not on the learning outcome of the three approaches.