Abstract:

Self-correcting exercises are powerful tools to promote self-study, immediate feedback and reuse of teaching materials in digital environments. H5P is a popular framework that provides a vast variety of interactive content types to create such exercises and to share them in several content and learning management systems, e.g. Wordpress or Moodle. One of the main advantages of H5P is that it is a self-contained format that includes all necessary elements in a single file, thus simplifying portability among different platforms. Unfortunately, not all important frameworks have an H5P plugin. One that has not is CodeIgniter, precisely the PHP web application framework that we have previously used to introduce a pandemic game in Fundamentals of Genetic Engineering and Genomics (FGEG), a second-year subject of the Biology Degree at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).

Gamification of FGEG has proved a valuable approach to motivate students to learn the theory of the Genetic Engineering tools that they will later apply in the wet lab. To get points and play the game, small groups of students need to solve tasks that the teachers pose in the classroom, including Kahoot questions, Socrative quizzes, and pen and paper exercises. However, lack of integration within the game application means that each teacher must feed marks in by hand and students see the game tasks as extra and often superfluous workload, somewhat detached from the game. Another common complaint is that not all members in each group contribute equally, a problem partly due to not having simple individual tasks within the game, which could easily be implemented with H5P. For these reasons, last year we started building a much-needed H5P system for CodeIgniter. Here we report on its development and integration within the Pandemic game.

Among the benefits of introducing H5P exercises in the game, we found a more pervasive participation of all students in problem-solving within the game platform, compared to exercises proposed directly in the classroom, as well as more collaboration among teachers who could prepare and share exercises more easily. Additionally, we enrolled some students from the Biochemistry degree who contributed to programming the H5P system. Since Bioinformatics, is a last-year subject in their degree, we expect that they will profit from this experience in future courses. One limitation of H5P exercises is that they are general-purpose, whereas some Genetic Engineering exercises, such as plasmid design, have very specific needs. We conclude that in addition to the new H5P system for CodeIgniter, additional content types will have to be produced to accommodate Biochemistry and Molecular Biology characteristics.

Keywords:

Self-learning, portable exercises, open-source tools, gamification, motivation.