During lectures, the interaction between instructors and students composing the audience is usually exhausted to short discussions where instructors ask a question, few students come up with a reply which maybe further commented by instructors. This scheme is not necessarily bad since it can guarantee a flow in the evolution of lectures. It can, however, discourage students of low self-confidence to actively participate or less socialized / shy students to fail build communication channels with instructors or fellow students for clarifying grey issues on the spot. It can also contribute to the alienation of instructors with their students due to the preservation of a false reality regarding students understanding of presented material. Game-like approaches embedded into lectures focusing on obtaining real-time response can increase student participation and engagement while offering instructors the opportunity to elegantly track audience response and evaluate the communicative quality of their lectures.

Motivated by these observations, in this work, we present "I2C: Is It Clear?", an online game-based application aiming to facilitate academic lectures by making them more interactive for students while providing insight to instructors regarding the understanding of their audience. The application name "Is It Clear?" actually reveals our intention with this online application, that is to provide a tool to instructors to submit short questions during lectures in the form of polls in order to check whether the material presented is clear to students attending the lecture. To this aim, instructors prepare and schedule short questions before class which are presented to students together with answer options during lectures. Then, students can submit their replies in an interactive way, like participating in an online poll, experiencing engagement and fun. Instructors can create courses and populate them with short questions in the form of polls while students can register to courses and participate in active questions/polls. Furthermore, instructors and students can also have access to analytics regarding posted questions; analytics include participating population and distribution of answers/votes submitted by students together with corresponding visualizations.

Compared to other existing relevant applications or platforms, like for example Poll Everywhere, Socrative and Kahoot, which mainly address evaluation aspects of learning and training, "I2C" focuses on the curriculum of each department with an intention to offer students and instructors an additional tool to facilitate lectures and make them more interactive and engaging by exploiting students’ smartphones or tablets in order to improve and leverage classroom experience. Our application is new and we plan to start using it in classroom during the coming spring semester. However, preliminary informal evaluation conducted so far shows that "I2C" attracts the attention and interest of both students and instructors who experimented with it.

"I2C" is a lightweight responsive web application with an elegant and user-friendly interface currently available in greek and english. "I2C" has been developed using the flutter open-source software framework, the dart programming language and android studio.

Keywords: Online game-based application, audience response systems, academic lectures, learning engagement and fun, live feedback, flutter, dart, android studio.