Austin Scott thumbs through an Internet Explorer browser window looking for an answer.

Swipe. Swipe. Bingo.

A few clicks later and he and his team have assembled a five-question interactive test that make the most of the tablets that Manteca Unified students use in the classroom – using an on-the-spot quiz game called Kahoot! that is gaining traction in educational circles and making learning for students like Scott fun again.

And he’s got a few people in the room that have a vested interest in seeing how well their game is doing with its target audience.

On Friday representatives from Norway and London-based We are Human – the software engineering company that designed Kahoot! – made a special trip to Manteca at the invitation of Superintendent Jason Messer. Company CEO and co-founder Johan Brandon and VP of Business Development Asmund Furuseth toured classrooms at McParland Elementary with district and site administrators and school board trustees to see kids utilizing the technology in real time.

Having the distinguished guests, Messer said, was unexpected – the byproduct of luck and a blind appearance at the company’s booth at the South-by-Southwest festival in Austin, Texas two weeks ago.

When Messer recapped how popular the program has become with some teachers, it kicked off a dialogue that included an invitation to an afterhours gathering and ultimately the acceptance of an invitation to visit the district when making a swing through Northern California to visit Google.

“Seeing these kids and what they can do with technology continues to blow me away,” Messer said. “You see this same intensity with Kahoot! whether it’s second graders or AP Calculus kids and that shows that they are engaged and interested in learning. And to have the designers of the software here today is amazing.”

It was a teacher – McParland 7th grade history teacher Ken Johnson – that turned Messer onto what Kahoot! actually is and it can be used for in the classroom.

On Friday Johnson paced back and forth amongst his students in a shirt, jacket and tie – peering over shoulders and interjecting an enthusiastic and encouraging line when he saw the opportunity.

The need to keep the students, engaged, however, was hardly a problem.

All around the classroom students gathered the groups of five and six with their tablets and worked diligently on making their quizzes – the sounds of laughter echoing among the room.

“They’re engaged and their excited and when you have those two things it makes learning fun,” Johnson said. “As a teacher the one thing that I always worked at was trying to make learning fun, and when you see the kids and how much they love to learn, you see how a program like this is such a good thing.”

Scott, who credits history as his favorite subject, says that the new technological slant on in-class instruction is a welcome deviation from the traditional book-and-paper ways of the past.

It’s fun, he says. And when it’s fun, it makes it easier to stay engaged.

“We’ve learned with papers and pencils for a long time and it’s time for something new – that’s what Kahoot! is and it’s something that everybody likes,” Scott said. “It’s a lot more fun and it’s a lot more engaging and that matters.”