Playful competition? The performativity of Kahoot! in an elite private girls’ school

Gamified learning platforms are now ubiquitous in secondary education. They are often marketed to schools as fun and engaging. Kahoot! is such a platform, popular in schools around the globe. Combining a walkthrough of Kahoot! with ethnographic fieldwork in an elite private girls’ school in Australia, I explore how the platform’s semiotic orchestration promotes a certain idea of engagement and how this was taken up by students and teachers. Drawing on poststructuralist notions of performativity, I argue that Kahoot! promotes a ‘language game’ of engagement steeped in output maximisation, which is made more palatable by a semiotics of frivolity. I call this ‘playful’ competition. I also use performativity to theorise students’ engagement with Kahoot! as a ‘citational’ practice, simultaneously informed by registers of competitive sportsmanship and academic performance. While the competition afforded by Kahoot! may align well with the competitive culture of elite schooling in Australia, it contrasted with forms of modest engagement promoted by some in the school.