Available in English Commercial Yes | Owner Kahoot! Edu | |
Registration None for quiz participation; required for quiz creation Users 1.5 million+ registered educators, 49 million+students | ||
Kahoot! is a free game-based learning platform, as educational technology. Launched in August 2013 from Norway, Kahoot! is now played by over 50 million people in 180 countries. Designed to be accessible to classrooms and other learning environments worldwide, Kahoot!’s learning games ("kahoots") can be created by anyone and are not restricted as to age level or subject matter. As Kahoot! may be played using any device, desktop or laptop with a web browser, it is rapidly gaining traction in classes with "bring your own device" policies.
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Usage
Kahoot! is typically used for formative assessment, to monitor each student’s progress towards learning objectives, identify strengths and weaknesses, and to identify areas where the students would benefit from more one-to-one teaching, more challenging learning opportunities, or a review of foundational knowledge for that subject.
More experienced users also integrate kahoots into their curriculum to introduce new topics, increase retention of new facts, revise before exams, challenge classrooms around the world, survey opinions, gather insights, facilitate discussion, or to reward and re-energize learners.
The majority of Kahoot!’s users are students and teachers in K-12 classrooms, with growing numbers of colleges and universities and post-graduate education. Businesses also use Kahoot! For workplace training and staff inductions.
Gameplay
Kahoot! is designed for social learning, with learners gathered around a common screen. In a typical classroom environment, this will be a smartscreen, interactive whiteboard, or a computer monitor. Many kahoots are also played using screensharing tools such as Skype, Appear.in and Google Hangouts.
When a kahoot is launched, it will have its own unique PIN randomly generated by the system. Using any device with a web browser, players visit the website dedicated for quiz participation, kahoot
During gameplay, the questions and up to 4 multiple choice answers are displayed on the main screen. Every answer corresponds to a distinctive color and shape. On the screen of the learners' devices, there are at most four rectangles with the color and the shape on each, and the learner needs to click or tap on the rectangle representing the correct answer. The game design is such that the players are required to frequently look up from their devices, enabling social interaction with the teacher and their peers.
For every question answered correctly, a number of points (with a maximum of 1000, depending on the time the student takes to answer the question) is awarded to each learner. At the end of every question, the learner sees his current score and his ranking in the class on his own screen. The learners with the 5 highest scores are displayed on the leaderboard on the main screen as well, to encourage healthy competition among players.
Supported devices
Influenced by the "bring your own device" trend, Kahoot! aims to support a wide range of web browsers and mobile devices through its web interface, including Android 4.0 or later and all modern web browsers. There is also a native application for Android available, and according to Kahoot! apps for other platforms are planned but not the top priority. There is also an application for iOS and Android.
Pedagogy
The Kahoot! pedagogy is based on creating a trusted learning space, encouraging a loop from "learner to leader".
In a classroom environment, the typical "learners to leaders" loop is normally as follows:
Origins
Kahoot! was developed by its three founders, Johan Brand, Jamie Brooker and Morten Versvik, as a joint project between Mobitroll and the Norwegian University of Technology & Science.
The core quiz format is based on research by Professor Alf Inge Wang and colleagues at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). The technology platform itself stems from research conducted by Morten Versvik as part of his master's degree at NTNU. The Pedagogy and User Experience were informed by the work co-founders Jamie Brooker and Johan Brand developed while at their London-based behavioral design agency, We Are Human.
Kahoot! is owned and funded by the founding team, and has also received grant funding from the Norwegian Research Council.
Awards
Research
According to a research done by two students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the network latency in accessing the website greatly influences the quality of experience of the platform, in both longitudinal and cross-section studies, with a sample size N=21. It is found that about 70% of the sample size regard Kahoot! as having positive results on all delay levels, while a varying amount of students (between 10-20%) report that the platform is too time-consuming, forming a direct relationship with the duration of delay.