Gaining and maintaining student attention through competitive activities in cooperative learning A well-received experience in an undergraduate introductory Artificial Intelligence course

Abstract

Digital-age undergraduate students exhibit a very short attention span, which is rapidly diminishing even further, posing a critical concern to today's academic community. This presents an immediate need for a non-traditional teaching and learning approach that is well-adapted to their diverse modern life-style. Instead of lectures only, interactive in-class activities do attract some attention, but do not guarantee to retain this focus. Maintaining students' attention, keeping them concentrated while they are studying, is no less of a crucial dilemma. It is therefore the focus of this research. Working in small groups is engaging and fun but students may easily move off-topic when a task is slightly complex or demanding. To overcome this, we are incorporating challenging elements, featuring built-in competitiveness into every cooperative activity and exercise we organize in our classroom, an introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI). Exploiting the strong competitive nature of college students allows us to securely capture their full attention. Our students continue enjoying the activities, collectively focusing their efforts on given tasks, and undertaking assigned projects. As a consequence, and often without realizing it, they are learning new concepts first-hand with real examples. To evaluate the effectiveness of our methodology, students completed a questionnaire with targeted questions. Their feedback provides a strong positive validation of the approach taken. © 2014 IEEE.