Right! Competition Time: Using Fun and Competition to Engage and Learn

This is authored by Tegan DeClark | Academic in the School of Business

Why this mattered

Before my first trip teaching in the Joint China Program, I was warned that engagement and course outcomes could be challenging. Students are bright and interested, but the format is intense: we have just 10 days to teach an entire subject and prepare students for assignments and exams, while they are also managing cognitive load, language and context challenges.

I quickly realised there was no possible way students could retain an entire textbook simply because I had delivered the content.

What changed my thinking

So I drew on a slightly unexpected part of my background: theatre.

I am comfortable on stage, and rather than just trying to engage students, I worked to entertain them. I added fun, humour and laughter, and started breaking up intensive content delivery with competitions.

What I redesigned

“Right! Competition time”

I would gather two teams and challenge them to solve puzzles on the board based on the core frameworks they needed for the final exam. There were lollies for the winning team, although enthusiasm and effort were generally enough to earn one. The response was almost instant. The room shifted. Students sat up, paid attention and prepared themselves whenever they heard those three words.

Then, a few days in, something interesting happened. I put one of the more obscure frameworks on the board and announced a competition. As I walked towards the back of the room to choose my teams, I discovered students scrolling through the PowerPoints and textbook, desperately trying to find the framework in case I picked them. Many of them had it already up on their screens. I caught them studying.

They had no only caught on to my approach, and they were getting ahead of me and I needed to make it harder.

Right! Competition time…. Tegan with her students. Source: Tegan DeClark, copyright 2026.

The exam was still weeks away and the pressure to learn for it was still somewhat abstract but as the competition was happening today, students began actively looking for frameworks and concepts they thought I might test them on. They photographed slides as I presented them, they made lists and framework summary sheets and asked, “Will you test us on this one?” They were engaging with the content because they knew I was going to come back and ask them about it very soon.

The competitions became larger and more complex. Always once the group was chosen there were no phones, no text books or computers. It was all memory recall. Sometimes students couldn’t discuss the answers with eachother. Sometimes they had one minute at the board before tagging the next person in a sort of relay, they had to correct their teammate’s errors and continue. Students taught each other, explained frameworks and expanded on one another’s knowledge.

I developed this into what I call the Vanishing Framework: Which is Complete, Partial, Prompt, Blank, Retrieval.

Students moved from being given complete information, to recalling partial information, to working from a prompt, and finally to retrieving and applying a framework from only its name or context, without textbooks, phones or help from one another.  If they cannot do this under exam conditions, I have not done mu job properly.

What changed

Looking back, I can see the learning design underneath the fun: progressively reducing the scaffold required students to move from recognition towards retrieval, application and independent recall.

By the final days in my classroom, this was a completely different learning environment from Day One. Students approached me during breaks to ask which frameworks I would test next. They asked what terms meant, how frameworks were used and why. They wanted to understand.

My favourite evidence of that change came from what I affectionately called my “orphan students”. In such a large cohort, I sometimes didn’t immediately recognise everyone who were not in every class. More than once I started talking to an unfamiliar student, only to discover they weren’t taking my subject at all. They had simply heard the class was fun and wanted to join us and they often returned just to join in. My students often said to me that they didn’t expect this class to be fun.  

Not everyone has a theatre background or wants to jump around a classroom being silly. Nor should they. The lesson I took from this experience is not that every teacher should run competitions or hand out lollies, it is simply that we need to find our own way to gain students’ attention and engage them and only then deliver the content and give them a reason to do something with what we teach.

I genuinely believe we need to visit the content regularly, but just don’t stay there. Go on holiday somewhere more interesting.

Learning is not simply hearing the content we deliver. It is being able to retrieve and use it when it matters. As teachers and facilitators, we need to find the methods that help our students get there.

Mine just happens to involve fun, games and the occasional bag of lollies. Because you do not need to be serious to be professional, you can choose to make it fun.

This reflective blog post is part of the Faculty’s Learning and Teaching SLOWposium 2026: Elevate session. Continue the conversation by exploring the reflections of our fellow presenters and discovering new perspectives on learning and teaching. Read the other presenters’ reflections here.

You can download Tegan’s presentation slides here