Engaging Students in a Peer‑Quizzing Game to Encourage Active Learning and Building a Student‑Generated Question Bank

Abstract

Games are a great source of entertainment and are used by people of all ages; they motivate and engage people and affect their behavior. Therefore, games have been widely studied in many non‑game contexts. Education is one of those areas where gamified, and game‑based learning strategies have been implemented and explored. To engage and motivate students to quiz each other, and as a side effect, build a question bank, as well as to study the gaming and learning behavior of students, we used a peer‑quizzing game called "Tower of Questions" (ToQ). The game uses some themes and mechanics found in tower defense (TD) games. The students received points for posing and answering the questions in the game in the form of gems. Students played the game with pseudonyms for one academic term and were told not to disclose their identities to anyone. We conducted a 3‑month long study for two consecutive years in the same first‑year undergraduate computer science course. In this paper, we present the findings from our studies using ToQ, specifically findings related to the students’ self‑monitoring and quizzing activities based on the game logs and two self‑reported surveys from data collected in the second year of the study.