Abstract:

Background:
Gamification consists of applying the principles and techniques of games to other types of less playful activities. This approach takes advantage of the natural predisposition towards games in order to improve motivation for learning, knowledge acquisition or skills development. Among other benefits, the use of games to motivate learning improves communication, stimulates student participation, makes difficult and boring activities more fun, or promotes perseverance. This is especially useful in teaching subjects with a lot of specific nomenclatures and abstract definitions, that is the case of the subject of General Psychopathology. This subject is offered in the second year of the Psychology degree and introduces a large amount of terminology and definitions of different psychopathological alterations (i.e., alterations in the processes of memory, attention, imagination, orientation, thinking, among others) that students are not familiar with, making it especially difficult for them to follow the theoretical classes.

Objective:
The aim of the study is to increase the motivation and participation of the students to facilitate the continuous study during the course, to better consolidate the theoretical contents of the subject and to create a space for discussion and resolution of doubts. To do so, we will use the Kahoot platform, a free tool that allows the creation of squeezes in a very dynamic manner.

Method:
The sample will be formed by the students enrolled in the subject General Psychopathology, of the Degree of Psychology at the Campus of Teruel (University of Zaragoza) offered in the second semester of the academic year 2021/2022 (N=65) The teachers of the subject will synthesize the main theoretical contents of each topic and will generate a battery of ten multiple-choice questions for each psychopathological alteration, with four alternative answers in the Kahoot platform. At the end of each theoretical topic, the teacher of the course will start the self-assessment questions through Kahoot, and the students, through their smartphones, will answer them.

Expected results:
The results of the Kahoot questions will be analyzed (number of successes and failures of each topic, at a general level), which will allow us to reinforce and review the contents where the students have made more mistakes. The satisfaction and usefulness of the methodology used during the subject will also be evaluated.

Conclusions:
The introduction of gamification techniques in the classroom will allow students to be an active part of the teaching-learning process of the subject, encouraging their interaction in the classroom, their participation and motivation. Moreover, this will positively affect the acquisition of the theoretical knowledge of the subject.

Keywords:

General Psychopathology, Degree of Psychology, Learning, Gamification, Kahoot.