Abstract:

Theory classes can be challenging for teachers as it is difficult to catch students’ attention and to maintain them engaged during the class. Nowadays, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) offer an enormous range of resources and tools that can be integrated in the classroom in order to involve students. Kahoot! has emerged in the last years as a great tool to foster students’ participation and motivation. This free, online resource allows teachers to implement game mechanics and dynamics through interactive quizzes, which can be based on the course contents. It allows students to track their own progress as it gives instant feedback and teachers can also store the reports concerning students’ progress. Therefore, Kahoot! can be used as an evaluation tool as well.

This proposal describes an experience based on Kahoot! implemented in two groups of students from the Translation and Interpreting degree of the University of Granada. The students were enrolled in a general translation course and, for most of them, this course was their first contact with translation. The course curriculum is divided in two parts. The first part of the course comprises five theoretical topics focused on several aspects of Translation Theory and Linguistics. The second part of the course is devoted to practical group activities that simulate real translation projects.

Kahoots were used during the first part of the course. Five different Kahoots formed by ten questions were prepared to cover all the theoretical topics of the course. Therefore, after the presentation of each of the topics students had to play a Kahoot to check if they had acquired the different contents exposed during the class. The results of the Kahoots were used to evaluate students’ academic performance as they accounted for 10% of their final mark. In this sense, each Kahoot was worth ten points (one for each question) if a student answered wrongly more than four Kahoot questions it was considered as a fail and no points were added. Our results show that Kahoot! has a great potential when it comes to consolidate theoretical knowledge as most of the students successfully passed all the Kahoots.

Keywords:

Kahoot, gamification, Translation and Interpreting, ICT, higher educarion.