Open classroom: enhancing student achievement on artificial intelligence through an international online competition

Limitations of formal learning e.g., one-way communication, rigid methodology, results-oriented approach can significantly influence the motivation and expectation of students, thus resulting in an academic progress reduction. In order to make learning processes more playful and motivating, this paper presents a new educational experience developed by two groups of Computer Science students at the University of Huelva Spain. As a result, an authentic real experience was incorporated into the classical teaching of Artificial Intelligence courses where classroom sessions were changed during some days for an international online competition. A comprehensive study considering the competition ranking, the students' opinion and their academic progress was analysed to assess the followed methodology. We found out that the educational experience improved the students' motivation, thereby enhancing their academic performance and personal skills as a result of learning through play. Moreover, additional teaching goals e.g., learning new programming languages or increasing exam attendance were obtained because of the positive motivation experienced by the competition. As a conclusion, this paradigm of real-life experience - not otherwise provided by traditional practical lessons - allowed us to ascertain that the process is more important than the outcome, which could be adapted to different teaching scenarios within an institution.