Turning a traditional teaching setting into a feedback-rich environment

Abstract

There is a constant need to look for new ways of motivating students, of providing them prompt feedback and of helping them to retain the material at lectures. This need is met here by introducing a game (a cyclist race inspired by ‘Le Tour de France’) built around a Student Response System where students are addressed with questions aligned to learning outcomes, which they answer on their own tablets, laptops or smartphones during lectures. Stages take place at selected lecturing slots and for each stage, standings with times are allocated to the students based on the accuracy and speed of their replies. By computing the times of all stages, it is possible to obtain the overall standings. All this info is updated live during and right after each stage. The learning experience is tested in two civil engineering subjects where students’ satisfaction and performance are shown to be significantly enhanced.