USE OF A GAME-BASED LEARNING PLATFORM TO IDENTIFY DEFICIENCIES IN BASIC SUBJECTS OF FIRST YEAR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

The Faculty of Pharmacy has implemented a tutorial plan (Tutorgrados 2.0), for new students of the degrees of Pharmacy, Human and Dietetic Nutrition, and Food Science and Technology. One of the initiatives within this plan is to offer support seminars for some basic subjects, which has been carried out for several years now. In order to improve these seminars and hence, the academic achievement of students, the novelty this year was to assess their needs beforehand. The chosen tool to perform the assessment was the free game-based learning platform Kahoot. The professors created a multiple-choice quiz for the corresponding subject. At the beginning of the course, all the students participated in the quizzes and so, the results showed the knowledge level and the areas or skills subject to improvement. It was found that the students had difficulties with several essential concepts such as graphical representation or thermodynamic problems in Physics, acid-base reactions in Chemistry or integration in Mathematics. The students and professors were satisfied with the implementation of this new idea. Determining the issues in each subject acted as a starting reference point and determined the rest of the class contents. The students are motivated by the social learning, interactive and competitive features of the platform. These all are key points to optimize the seminars and improve the results given the lack of time. Despite the benefits described, it must be said that the platform has its limitations such as restriction of space to write the questions and answers, impossibility of writing complex mathematical equations, short time to answer, etc. Therefore, further improvements will be addressed in the near future.