Lecture Quiz 3.0: A Gaming Platform for Lectures

This thesis is the continuation of our specialization project, Lecture Quiz 2.5.This platform is a game-like system where lecturers can hold quizzes in lectures to increase student participation and interactivity.The current version is a finished lecture quiz system that can be used in lecture environments.Lecture Quiz 3.0 has moved away from earlier implementations, by centralizing and minimizing the effort to start and run quizzes.One focus was multi-platform and we developed the system to support Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.This system can be used in lecture environments to promote more student participation, and enable variation in teaching methods.To run quiz games, the lecturer can use a PC, connect it to the projector, and run the Presentation Client.Students access the Player Client via a mobile device such as a smart phone or notebook, the address to the Player Client web page is presented on the Presentation Client.Once connected, they choose a username, and answer multiple choice questions, which are presented on the projector screen.To keep things interesting for the students, we focused on the visual expression of the Presentation Client and Player Client.This is to give the players the experience of playing a game, rather than answering a questionnaire.We developed the system with usability in mind.This is to ensure that the system feel easy to use, for both students and lecturers.One of the main goals is to make lecturers see the system as an alternative to a regular presentation, and not as extra work.A lecturer might be interested in collecting statistics about the students' overall progress in the course.This way they might be able to give a larger focus to the parts of the syllabus where the students lack performance.Another factor is that creating quizzes is time consuming, and needs to be done in advance of a lecture.We developed a separate quiz manager and statistics tool that can be used by lecturers, named Quiz Server.It is a Web based application, utilizing Java EE to enable multi-platform support.We performed an experiment in a lecture to get feedback from students on how they perceived the Lecture Quiz game.This experiment was performed by running a quiz in the lecture hall and then the students were asked to fill in an evaluation form.The students who participated thought that Lecture Quiz had a positive effect on the lecture