How Kahoot became my teaching life saver

Student engagement is such a common pain point when it comes to improving teaching. This term marks my one-year anniversary of teaching with the Personalised English Language Enhancement (PELE) team, so I’m really excited to share some reflections on this journey.

Among the many challenges I’ve faced, the one thing I want to talk about most is how I’ve used Kahoot in class.

A bit of context

One year ago, I had no teaching experience in any formal sense.

I was a computational materials science research student, freshly out of my PhD, and honestly, I had no idea whether I could do a good job teaching — especially in PELE, which is an English communication course.

I’m really grateful that the team was willing to let me try, considering that most of my relevant experience came from mentoring students in this course during my PhD.

One of the biggest challenges for me was self-confidence. I’m naturally quite shy and introverted, and this became especially obvious when I compared myself with other tutors in the program, or tutors from social science backgrounds in general. Many of them seemed so natural at engaging students just by talking.

I didn’t feel like I had a “teaching style” at all. So, during this first year, I was also trying to explore what my own style could look like.

Discovering Kahoot

I first found out about Kahoot because one of the staff members in the team was using it.

And I have to say, it became a big life saver for me.

As someone who is naturally shy and completely new to teaching, I often found myself getting even more nervous than the students. Sometimes the classroom felt very serious and full of awkward silence. There were so many things I wanted to improve, but I didn’t know where to start. Kahoot became an easy and accessible place to begin.

What I really like about Kahoot is that it allows me to prepare a lot beforehand, which is something I’m good at. Instead of relying only on spontaneous classroom energy, I can design activities in advance and bring that energy into the room through the game.

Using Kahoot for community building

Depending on the teaching stage, the purpose of a Kahoot game can be different. But one common theme across all classes, especially at the beginning of term, is community building.

At the start of the term, I want students to feel safe and comfortable in the classroom. Kahoot has helped a lot with that.

In this phase, I usually design questions related to UNSW student life, especially some silly ones. A lot of these questions draw from my own experience as a student at UNSW.

My favourite questions are animal-related, such as:

What animal is the UNSW mascot?

What is his name?

When I bring out these Kahoot games, I can immediately hear the classroom becoming much noisier — in a good way. Students start laughing, guessing, reacting, and talking to each other. If you’re based at UNSW, you can probably tell that some of the incorrect answers are quite fun.

Using Kahoot to check understanding

As we move further into the term, there are more and more knowledge-based challenges in class, and Kahoot helps me tackle them.

From the students’ answers, I can immediately tell which knowledge points are weak or confusing. This makes explaining concepts much easier because I can be more focused. Instead of repeating the same lecture content again and again, I can respond directly to what students actually need help with.

A few tips that worked for me

One thing I’ve found useful is to always include at least one silly or fun wrong answer. It makes the game feel less stressful and more playful.

I also like to start the whole Kahoot question set with some easy and silly questions before moving into more serious content. This helps students relax first, and then they are more willing to engage with the actual learning material.

Sometimes I also bring small gifts or lollies for the winners at the end. It’s a simple thing, but students seem to enjoy it, and it adds a bit of excitement to the class.

Learning by playing

I have explored many different types of learning materials to help me design Kahoot games, from research papers, to blogs, to videos on YouTube. But the best learning material, in my opinion, is actually the Kahoot website itself. There are lots of officially designed games that I can run and test by myself.

By experiencing Kahoot as a player, I can learn not only how to design a better game, but also how students might feel during the activity. This has been really useful for improving my own question design.

Final reflections

Looking back, Kahoot has been one of the key tools that helped me discover my own teaching style.

There are still so many features available on Kahoot that I’m learning and experimenting with. But even just using its most basic features has already given me a way to make my classes more interactive and fun while still feeling natural to me.

If you also feel shy, unsure, or a bit lost when it comes to classroom engagement, I’d really recommend giving Kahoot a try!