Five Years of Kahoot! in the Classrooms – What does Research Tell Us?

Abstract

One of the current major trends in education is the integration of innovative technology. In this context, gamification – which encompasses the integration of game elements in non-gaming systems (Licorish, Owen, Daniel, & George, 2018) – plays an important role. In this paper, we consider one specific game-based learning tool: Kahoot! (Existing literature uses both options, Kahoot and Kahoot!. We select the latter as the exclamation mark belongs to the term.), which can be classified as a student response system (Plump & LaRosa, 2017). Although there are similar tools such as Socrative (www.socrative.com), Kahoot! proved to be the most played one. As stated on the company website (https://kahoot.com/company/, accessed January 29, 2019), Kahoot! reached more than 70 million unique monthly active users at the end of 2017. Around 60% of them were from the United States of America but the tool has been played all over the world. There are 60 million games available, and a total of 2 billion players have played on the Kahoot! platform since its launch. Aside from classroom settings, 97% of Fortune 500 companies use Kahoot! as of October 2018. Kahoot! was founded in Norway and published in September 2013. Thus, when preparing this article in late 2018, it has been in the classrooms for around five years.