Abstract:

We assume that learning can be more efficient if a student is an active subject in his learning process. Online games, whose ludic and entertaining character, promote the student's active role in learning, can also be a pedagogical strategy for assessing the knowledge acquired by students throughout the teaching-learning process.

Kahoot! learning platform was used to create 4 games, quizzes, applied in 4 different moments, over 2 weeks, to evaluate students' acquired knowledge during e-learning. Two games were played each week. The adopted methodology is a case study, the data collection was made through tasks performed by students on the online games.

In this study we investigate if Kahoot! Platform promotes learning and student involvement in carrying out tasks about the thematic electricity, of the programme of the discipline “Physics and Chemistry”, during e-learning. The study involved two classes attending 3rd cycle of basic education, in a school in the north of Portugal, with 20 and 16 students respectively, aged between 14 and 15 years old. The study was carried out over 2 weeks in March, during the period of compulsory isolation due to Covid-19.

The first author of this study created the games on kahoot!' website, https://kahoot.com. Each game is a quiz, used to evaluate the class question, with multiple choice questions about contents of electricity, teaching by e-learning. All quiz questions have images referring to the evaluated content and the response time to each question is 60 seconds. It should be noted that students are familiar with this learning platform and online games. Each student enters his name and accesses the online game. At the end of the game, students' names are organized by the score obtained and made available in the platform reports.

The methodology adopted is a case study, based on the collection of data by performing the tasks of the games in Kahoot.

At the beginning of each week, an online quiz was made available to students, which was the diagnostic assessment (pre-test) of the contents to be taught that week, and at the end of the week, another online quiz was made available to the students to assess the electricity contents learned by the students and which contains some of the pre-test questions. The set of questions equal to those of the pre-test, constitutes the post-test.

The results show that there was a slight decrease in the number of participants from the first to the second week of 11.5% (7 students), which may be related to the stress of the evaluations and possible lack of material resources. Regarding to the learning of the electricity contents, the preliminary results show a significant decrease in academic performance, throughout the two weeks of e-learning.

Keywords:

Kahoot, motivation, e-learning, electricity, physics.