Improvement of a Lecture Game Concept

A problem when teaching in classrooms in higher education is lack of support for interaction between the students and the teacher during the lecture. We have proposed a lecture game concept that can enhance the communication and motivate students through more interesting lectures. It is a multiplayer quiz game, called Lecture Quiz. This game concept is based on our current technology rich and collaborative learning environment and was proved as a viable concept in our first prototype evaluation. But based on our previous implementing experiences and students’ feedbacks about this game concept, it was necessary to improve this first lecture quiz prototype in four aspects: 1) Provide a more extensible and stable system; 2) Easier for students to start and use; 3) Easier for the teachers to use; and 4) Good documentation to guide the further development. According to these aims, we developed the second version of Lecture Quiz and carried out an evaluation. Through comparing the evaluation data from second version with first version of Lecture Quiz, we found that both surveys show that the Lecture Quiz concept is a suitable game concept for improving lectures in most of aspects and that Lecture Quiz have been improved in several ways, such as editor for the teachers to update the questions, improved architecture that could be easy to extend to the new game modes, web-based student clients to get an easier start than first version of lecture quiz, etc. The results are encouraging for further development of the Lecture Quiz platform and for exploring more in this area.