2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engagement plays a crucial role in shaping students’ learning experiences and academic outcomes. This paper studies the impact of competitive polling on student engagement and learning outcomes in a traditional mechanical engineering course, Energy Conversion Systems. Polling has been increasingly used in higher education to promote active learning and increase participation, especially in a class with a large student enrollment. Modern tools, such as Mentimeter, Kahoot, Quizizz, etc., offer competitive polling that creates a gamified environment, fostering real-time student interaction and healthy competition among students.
In this study, Mentimeter was used to conduct competitive polling in class. A mixed-methods approach was employed, incorporating a survey to assess student perceptions of in-class engagement during competitive polling activities, and semi-structured interviews to explore the effect on student interest, motivation, and learning outcomes. The survey data revealed that students experienced significantly higher levels of engagement when the competitive elements were introduced. The major ways in which competitive polling makes students feel engaged are competitive interaction, in-time feedback on the answers, ranking with peers, and leaderboard right after each polling question. The survey data also addressed whether the leaderboard of competitive polling caused any negative feelings. 93% of students did not feel upset with the leaderboard, 7% were neutral, and no students voted for the leaderboard makes them feel upset. Further analysis of the interview results will be presented in this paper to discuss the effect of competitive polling on student interest, motivation, and learning outcomes.
Additionally, competitive polling was implemented as part of the classwork activities in this course. To encourage participation and motivate students to do their best on the polling questions, the classwork rubric was designed to award a full score of 5 points for participation, with an extra 1 point given to students who ranked in the top 50% of participants. The effectiveness of this rubric in fostering active participation and encouraging greater effort on the polling questions will also be discussed in this paper.