Leveraging Mobile Technology to Enhance Both Competition and Cooperation in an Undergraduate STEM Course

In this manuscript, we discuss the use of mobile technology in a STEM course to leverage both competition and cooperation among undergraduate students. We have designed an entire course around The Google Online Marketing Challenge, which is a worldwide keyword advertising competition. A competition is an effective strategy to structure a course, is motivating for students, and provides a built-in evaluation mechanism of how the students do relative to others. However, the idea of a competition cannot be taken too far, as learning is also a cooperative event. In order to leverage both competition and cooperation, we designed a mobile app from which the students can access a location-aware and social networked learning assistance. The idea was to make the course material accessible independent of locations and make the interaction among the students possible 24 × 7. The students also contributed to the course by sharing material and interacted with other students’ posted material via likes and comments. The student driven context collection and annotation has already improved the starting point for the course when it is taught next. There was also a notable improvement in the quality of the students’ finished products. Of the 16 teams in the course, 3 teams were in the top 15 teams worldwide, with many of the other teams in the top 10 % of teams worldwide.