How Aristo Educational Press Is Transforming Secondary Education in Hong Kong with Kahoot!

Taking learning beyond the limitations of traditional textbooks

Over the years, Aristo’s textbooks have supported thousands of students and teachers in Hong Kong throughout their learning and teaching journeys by providing curriculum-aligned content for subjects such as English, science, history, geography, economics, and mathematics.

Schools across Hong Kong choose Aristo’s textbooks because they trust the materials and the high-quality exercises. However, traditional paper-based learning exercises have struggled to keep pace with the realities of modern classrooms in Hong Kong. Even a well designed exercise in a textbook is still just a single page, and as technology has become more prevalent in these classrooms, teachers have increasingly sought digital tools that can engage students’ attention on screen.

“Our textbooks have already carried out lots of quality exercises. That’s the core of what we are doing now. The challenge was something else. So we kept asking ourselves: how could we make practice feel quick, easy, and engaging, and what do we put on school screens that is worth the attention of the students?”

Joe Chan, Manager, Information and Learning Technologies Department, Aristo Educational Press

Moreover, Joe and his team noticed a growing need among educators in Hong Kong to assess learning faster.

“There was another gap, talking about results and visibility. Because with paper exercises, teachers may need to mark around 30 scripts, 30 pages, before seeing where the students are struggling.”

Joe Chan, Manager, Information and Learning Technologies Department, Aristo Educational Press

Page to play approach with Kahoot! 

Joe and the team at Aristo looked into Kahoot! as a dual solution to help them address challenges related to student engagement and formative assessment. Rather than pushing teachers toward a new platform they’d have to learn from scratch, Aristo surveyed local educators first. Most were already using Kahoot! in their classrooms, so Aristo built on that.

The first step Aristo took was to add Kahoot! launcher buttons directly into its digital textbooks, presentation slides, and resource websites. A teacher can move a class from reading to playing with a single click due to Aristo converting textbook questions into different kinds of kahoots depending on where a lesson is headed:

• Warm-ups and topic activation: short quizzes to open a new topic and check what students already know.
• Quick checkpoints: brief check-ins that consolidate learning and lift energy midway through a long lesson.
• Full unit revisions: longer exercise sets for end-of-unit review or independent study at home.

Teacher autonomy and differentiated learning

With Aristo’s Kahoot! integrated textbooks, teachers keep control of the material. They can duplicate one of Aristo’s pre-made kahoots, edit the wording, adjust the timers, or cut questions to match their own class.

Thousands of students learning with engaging content

Across all subjects and titles, Aristo’s Kahoot! content has generated more than 46,000 plays and reached over 570,000 student participants. A single Junior Secondary Science series accounts for more than 22,000 of those participants, all through unit revision exercises played over three years.

That engagement doesn’t stop when school does. The number of plays continued to increase during the school holidays, a clear sign that students and teachers kept returning to the content for review well outside term time.

Joe points to three reasons Kahoot! fits an educational publisher’s needs.

1. The energy in the classroom is hard to replace: The music within Kahoot!, the pace, the leaderboard: none of that comes from a traditional assessment tool.
2. Freedom and adaptability for teachers: Teachers can adapt the content freely within Kahoot! based on the Aristo textbook content. That created a small ecosystem with educators building and sharing their own versions of Aristo’s kahoots, adapting them to their classrooms and curriculum.
3. No need to learn how to use a new tool:  Teachers and students already know Kahoot!, so adoption happens without an onboarding step.

What’s next: AI and differentiated learning

Aristo is approaching its 50th anniversary, and the team is already looking at what comes after page-to-play.

• AI-assisted personalization: using AI to help teachers adjust question difficulty and generate images and video that bring textbook concepts to life.
• Differentiated instruction: turning one core textbook exercise into several difficulty tiers for different groups of students, in minutes rather than hours.
• Professional development: running workshops with technology partners so teachers can use digital and AI tools with more confidence.