Abstract
This chapter shows the proposal of a team of professors from the Universidad San Pablo-CEU to facilitate the active participation of all students regardless of their type of attendance at classes (face-to-face, virtual synchronous, and virtual asynchronous). The proposal consists of an educational game of questions and answers that has been designed. The students create the game questions themselves and upload them via a web application at any time and from anywhere in the world. The games are developed in the class sessions, and the students, distributed in mixed face-to-face and virtual teams, participate together through their mobile phones. The initiative was enthusiastically embraced by the students, who showed involvement, great interest, and significantly improved their level of comprehension and academic success.
TopIntroduction
The students in our Degree in Architecture struggle to achieve a proficient level in the technical subjects, as those topics require significant involvement.
Succeeding in these subjects is highly conditioned by the student’s previous knowledge of mathematics and physics and their natural ability to abstract and analytical reasoning. It also depends on the number and variety of subjects enrolled simultaneously. Especially in the first couple of years, many students do not find it easy to combine the demanding dedication that all these design-related, humanistic, and technical disciplines require.
To help them in this task, since 2009, the teaching staff of the Building Structures area of the Universidad San Pablo-CEU has implemented numerous gamification initiatives that encourage the students’ interest, engagement, and active participation, contributing effectively to their learning process.
In the past, all these initiatives had been addressed face-to-face, during classes and labs. However, the confinement situations caused by the pandemic do not allow these attendance conditions; thus, the capacity for participation and learning is reduced.
The authors then set themselves the goal of providing students with a new methodology of active learning and procedures and means to continue to take advantage of collaborative activities in their training, despite the current situation.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Subject: One unit of study in which students enroll as part of a course.
Online, Synchronous Attendance: Situation where students attend their training activities remotely, by means of technology-driven solutions such as audio or video sharing. The media is consumed live, in a synchronous way.
Class Group: Subset of the students enrolled in the same subject that are organized according to an established criteria due to organizational needs, such as compatibility of schedules or optimization of the available human or material resources.
Online, Asynchronous Attendance: Situation where students attend their training activities remotely, by means of technology-driven solutions such as audio, video sharing, reading materials, etc. that the students review at the time it suits them better.
Team: A group of students organized to work together, sharing a common goal.
Question Status: The current situation of a question posed by a student, depending on whether it has been reviewed, approved, or pending for teacher’s review.
Web Application: A piece of software that runs on a remote server and use a local web browser as user interface.
Amphora: A two-handled jar with narrow neck used by the ancient Greeks and Romans to carry wine or oil. In QUAERO amphorae represent the achievements of the players.
Difficulty Level: A measurement of the degree of expertise needed to answer a QUAERO question.
Topic: A subdivision of the content of a subject.
Exceptional Question: A QUAERO question that leads to debate, reflection, and collaborative learning in an effective way.
Area: Stands for area of knowledge. Sub-discipline acknowledged as a significant part of the body of knowledge (this concept is usually applied to undergraduate courses).
Face-to-Face Attendance: Known as well as in-person instruction. Situation where students attend their training activities on-site, sharing the same physical space as their instructor.