Enhancing Student Performance through a Competitive Team Tournament

In some engineering subjects, the nature of the material requires a maturation time in the student’s mind before being fully understood and the time constraints of modularization can become an impediment to the successful achievement of their learning outcomes. This paper presents a novel and efficient way of helping students to timely meet their learning outcomes by means of a Team Game Tournament. The principle behind a Team Game Tournament is that the success of a team lies on the success of the individuals composing the team. Therefore, team mates help each other and study more than individually because they care for them and for the team. A variation of Team Game Tournament inspired by the UEFA ‘Champions League’ is used here to address learning outcomes for two different age groups, four modules, four engineering degrees and two countries during the 2013/14 and 2014/15 academic seasons. It is noticed that the more games between the teams, the more effective the team work and learning has become. Confidential questionnaires and end-of-semester exams confirm the success of the competition in enhancing student satisfaction and learning.