Gamification Tools: Kahoot

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Kahoot is a free to use tool that helps you create fun quizzes. It was created for educational purposes and its mainly aimed at students of all levels of education but I think it’s very valuable for corporate use as well. Kahoot was created during a joint project that was started at the Norwegian University of Technology and Science and turned into a company in 2013 with learning and fun at its heart.

The first thing you need to do to use Kahoot is create an account and start creating your first quiz. You can do that by visiting kahoot.com where you will find all the details on how to use it. It’s really fast and easy to create quizzes. You can add a picture or a video to go along with your questions. You can also choose how much time the players will have to answer the questions. Each time a player gets an answer right Kahoot awards him/her with points that are also based on how quick the answer was. After everyone has answered the results are shown on the screen and you can see how many right and wrong answers players gave and a small leader board with players with the most points on it.

Have a look at the following video to understand more:

Kahoot has a lot of gamification element that I want to analyse a bit. First of all you have points and a leader board that have been discussed so much in gamification. Once more, yes these are simple game mechanics but if applied correctly they can bring great results. In Kahoot they do bring great results either on the single mode or when you have people play in teams. Kahoot is a tool that is not supposed to be used super sophisticated.

It is the perfect tool to throw some questions and quizzes at the people that you are educating – training but that’s all. It’s not an LMS system, it doesn’t need to have a lot of game mechanics to engage people for a long time. You use it in the classroom, make learning more fun and then you use it again when you need to. It’s a not a system that people need to interact with everyday so I would say that it’s simple game mechanics and design work really well. It has a very useful feature though which is tracking the results of all the quizzes you run and can save them on a csv file and study them later. That way you can keep track of how well your students are doing long term.

We talked about #SmallGamification before and I will say again that gamification does not always mean a huge complex system that players interact with for hours.

Kahoot makes quizzes in a classroom fun and its very good at that. Notice one thing I have been repeating and a lot of people ask me, Kahoot can only be used if trainer and trainee are in the same space. Quizzes can only be run and answered in the same classroom – training room.

Having said all that I encourage everyone to try Kahoot out and share the results with us online tagging us on Twitter (@gamifiplus) using the hashtags #gamification #kahoot 

About the author 

Pete Baikins

Pete Baikins is an international authority on gamification, a lifelong gamer, successful entrepreneur and a lecturer. As CEO of Gamification+ Ltd he mentors and trains companies world-wide on the use of gamification to solve business challenges. Gamification+ won the Board of Trade Award from the UK's Department of International Trade in January 2019.

Pete is co-host of the health gamification podcast Health Points and is also Chair of Gamification Europe, the annual conference for Gamification practitioners.

Pete is an Honorary Ambassador for GamFed (International Gamification Confederation), having previously been the Chair from 2014 to February 2019, whose aim is to spread best practices within and support the gamification industry.

After 15 years as a Lecturer on gamification and entrepreneurship at the University of Brighton he now guest lectures on Gamification at King’s College London and at ESCP Europe at post-graduate and under-graduate levels.

Over the past 20 years Pete has built and sold two businesses. One was in security software and the more recent one was a telecoms and internet connectivity business. He is also an Ambassador for Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce in the UK.

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