COMPARISON OF GAMIFICATION TOOLS FOR EVALUATING THE ETHICAL, ENVIRONMENTAL AND PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY SKILLS IN SCIENCE DEGREES

Abstract

In the last two years the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has implemented the evaluation of key transversal competences in its degrees. The objective is to offer an added value both for UPV s graduates and their employers. Nowadays, labour market is demanding not only professional skills but also personal and transversal competences development. However, evaluating these skills may require evaluation methods and techniques different to traditional ones. The authors have worked with gamification tools to help assessing student s performance in Ethical, environmental and professional responsibility skill. The experiences described have been developed in the frame of an Innovative Educational Project Improvement during the academic years 2014/2015 and 2015/2016. The aim of this paper is to compare the performance of two gamification applications, Socrative and Quizbean, for evaluating the above mentioned skill. Both applications can be used in the classroom with different devices such as laptops, tablets or mobile phones, and are based on creating questionnaires. These applications also share other characteristics such as high number of questions allowed, relatively high number of students in the classroom, instant results, etc. Socrative was used in Thermodynamics and Chemical Kinetics course in the first year of the Bachelor s degree in Biotechnology. Quizbean was used in Groundwater management subject in the fourth year of the Bachelor s degree in Environmental Sciences. To increase student motivation, game rules were included to encourage competition. The questionnaires were designed and classified according to 3 possible levels of acquisition of the key competence, these levels are fully described in a specific rubric that was explained beforehand to the students. Both applications performed successfully and the specificities of each gamification tool are described in the results. Students were satisfactorily involved in the activity, and some examples are included to show different levels of competence acquisition.