Indian Journal of Educational Technology
Volume 2 No. 2, July 2020

171

Communication

Gamification for Student Engagement on Virtual
Classes

Salini Rosaline
Assistant Professor, VIT-AP School of Business, VIT-AP University, Amaravathi,

Andhra Pradesh, Email: salini.rosaline@vitap.ac.in

During the period of COVID-19 outbreak, 
we have adopted technology to cater the 
needs of teaching and learning process. 
In this article, I would like to share my 
experience teaching and tools that I 
have used to engage students during an 
online class. There are lot of challenges 
for a teacher when they are teaching in 
an online class, such as evaluation, lack of 
motivation in online learners, assessing 
the learning outcome, technical 
difficulties and many more. One of the 
biggest challenges that I faced would be 
engaging students during the class and 
also how to make sure that they are clear 
with the concepts taught.  I had come 
across concepts of gamification earlier 
but had never used them in online 
classes. Gamification introduces game 
elements into non-game contexts to 
attract participants and create gameful 
experiences (Hamari, Koivisto and Sarsa, 
2014). Researchers have emphasized 
the importance of gamification design 
in technology related activities specially 
to motivate the user. Exploring various 
options for using gamification in online 
classes, I found a website for making 
quizzes i.e. Quizziz.com. 

Quizziz is an online tool that helps 
teachers to conduct formative 
assessments in a fun and engaging 
way for any age group of students. This 
online tool can be incorporated in the 
instructional design, evaluation and 
helps in revision of the topics taught. 

Students are provided with a unique 
code to start the quiz in a live class or 
the quiz can be given as homework 
with a specific deadline. After the quiz 
gets over both the teacher and the 
student can review the performance 
of the student.  A detailed report of the 
questions, answers given by the student 
and overall accuracy of answering the 
questions can be downloaded from the 
Reports section in Quizziz. I used this 
report also to mark the attendance of 
students to see how many are actively 
participating in the class. I could also 
see the time taken by students to 
answer each question.  There were 
lesser chances for the student to 
cheat in the quiz as each question had 
a specific time limit to complete and 
also the questions were randomized 
for each student. Other advantage of 
Quizziz is that the tool is integrated 
with Google Classroom. Redemption 
question is a feature in this tool that 
repeats a question a student got wrong.  
This motivates the student to reflect 
and learn from their mistake they have 
made earlier.  Research studies have 
shown that reflecting on the mistakes 
and retrieval contributes to learning 
and memory (Roediger and Karpicke, 
2006). 

Students enjoyed and felt competitive 
while attending the quizzes made on 
Quizziz platform. Students implied 
that joining each quiz was easy and 



Indian Journal of Educational Technology
Volume 2 No. 2, July 2020

172

does not have the hazzle of sign up or 
log in.  They also felt playfully focusing 
on the quiz was important even when 
attending online assessments. ‘I wanted 
to come on the top of the game rank 
list, and for that I used to revise all the 
topics before attending the quiz’ said 
one student when asked about the 
learning using Quizziz.  There was a 

growing interest and motivation among 
the students attending the class online.  
Students also had the drive to be 
attentive in the classes and reduce other 
distractions. Such technology tools used 
in the process of teaching – learning 
will definitely support in the student’s 
cognitive and emotional outlook. 

References

Hamari, J., Koivisto, J. and Sarsa, H. (2014). “Does gamification work? –a literature review of 
 empirical studies on gamification”, in 47th HI International Conference on System 
 Sciences (HICSS), IEEE, pp. 3025-3034.

Roediger, H.L., and Karpicke, J.D. (2006). “The power of testing memory: Basic research and 
 implications for educational practice”, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(3), 
 181-210. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6916.2006.00012.x.