Tower of Questions (TOQ): A Serious Game for Peer Learning

Research has shown that educational games are effective in motivating and engaging students to learn. To contribute to ongoing research in the area of educational games, we developed and evaluated a peer-quizzing game, Tower of Questions (TOQ). In TOQ, students are anonymous and can create towers virtually by asking questions and can conquer towers by answering questions. Students receive incentives for asking and correctly answering questions. To evaluate the game, 37 first-year university students played the game regularly as part of an introductory programming course during an entire academic term. We compared the engagement of the students considering their gender, preferred mode of studying (cooperative and individualistic), and their final course grade.