A Design Exploration of a Peer-quizzing Game to Support Learning

The increasing popularity of educational games stems from their ability to create enjoyable and engaging learning experiences. Besides being engaging, these games boost cognitive skills, problem-solving, and memory. Unlike traditional methods, interactive educational games give students real-time feedback and encourage active learning. With advancing technology, the educational gaming field is expanding, offering a wide range of games catering to various ages and subjects. This dissertation proposes a novel design of an educational game, called “Tower of Questions”, where students take on the roles of both question creators and answerers. By creating quiz questions, students are encouraged to think critically about the learning material and synthesize their knowledge. They must deeply understand the content to create meaningful and challenging questions for their peers. By answering the quiz questions created by their peers, students can practice their knowledge of domain facts, concept definitions, and problem-solving. The active engagement with the material in both question creation and answering can enhance student learning and retention. The game dynamics incentivizes students to participate actively in both activities, while engaging in a fun, competitive learning experience. Points are awarded for formulating original, challenging questions, and for correctly answering questions posed by their peers. The competitive aspect of the game motivates students to contribute new questions to the question bank, generating a rich and diverse pool of questions, which can be used as a valuable learning resource for future students of the course. The question bank generated through the peer-quizzing game can be used in a variety of ways to enhance student learning. Instructors can utilize these student-generated questions for exams, training quizzes, and FAQs. The question bank can also serve as a study resource for students, allowing them to test their knowledge and prepare for assessments. Furthermore, the process of reviewing and answering peer-generated questions can help students identify knowledge gaps and reinforce their understanding of the material. The Tower of Questions game has been evaluated in several exploratory field studies over several years in a blended learning environment: university introductory programming classes. The results of these studies show the impact of student demographics, study preferences, player profiles on their game behaviours and learning, and the impact of gaming behaviours, including anti-social behaviours, such as power-gaming, on learning performance and the students’ experience in the game. This dissertation contributes to the field of educational game design by improving peer-quizzing to foster learning at several Bloom's Taxonomy levels, guiding students from fundamental factual knowledge to advanced critical thinking. The results of the exploratory studies using the peer-quizzing game bring new insights into the influence of various learner characteristics and behaviours on game-play dynamics and learning performance.