Learning by Gamification: An Effective Active Learning Tool in Engineering Education

One of the latest buzzwords in engineering education is ‘active learning’ and ‘Outcome Based Education’. Active learning refers to the idea that students are actively engaged in the learning process, rather than passively absorbing content. The COVID-19 pandemic has raised significant challenges for the higher education community worldwide. A particular challenge has been the urgent and unexpected request for previously face-to-face university courses to be taught online by using different online tools such as Microsoft Team, Zoom etc.

This paper describes the application of one of the gamification tools known as ‘Kahoot’ used for online teaching a course namely ‘Irrigation and Hydraulic Structures’ which is the core course of B.Tech. Civil Engineering Program. This course is related to the storage, transmission and use of water for irrigation purposes. Previously, the course was used to be taught by conventional methods in which the students were found to be unable to visualize various hydraulic structures such as dam, canal, cross drainage work etc. that are used for irrigation purposes and hence the expected course outcomes could not be attained. In the COVID-19 pandemic situation the same course was taught by online mode with the help of Microsoft Teams platform. However, it was difficult to engage all the 76 students and assess their performance. Hence, use of one of the gamification tools namely ‘Kahoot’ was done to assess and evaluate the performance of students. The entire class was divided into two groups namely ‘Control Group’, and ‘Experimental Group’. The ‘Control Group’ was assessed using conventional teaching involving ‘question answer session’, while the ‘Experimental Group’ was assessed by using the ‘Kahoot’ tool of gamification. The results of the study shows that the performance of ‘Experimental Group’ in the Unit Test Examination (i.e. average marks) improved by over 18% compared to the performance of ‘Control Group’. Thus, it can be concluded that use of ‘gamification’ as an active learning tool helps in enhancing the students understanding and hence attaining the expected outcomes.