Jogos pervasivo para o ensino

Abstract

Teaching is a complex process that requires a high degree of effort and motivation, particularly in STEM areas such as programming. Several teaching methodologies have been developed in order to increase students' motivation. In this work, we propose a solution based on pervasive games that make learning more fun and adapts to the context of the student. This solution is composed of an authoring tool for the teacher, a mobile location-based game and a server that provides integration of both.

This dissertation falls within the scope of the European project BEACONING (Breaking educational barriers with contextualized pervasive and gameful learning), which aims to enhance learning through gamification methods and pervasive games, adapted to each student, in order to enable a learning process "anywhere and at any time.".

The present dissertation will focus on the development of the authoring tool that enables the teacher to gamify lesson plans and to adapt them to different locations and students. Since the focus of BEACONING is the STEM area, a gamified lesson plan for the teaching of introductory programming was developed. This plan is going to merge one game narrative to a mix of mini-games and will be capable of enhancing the defined learning objectives. A specific mini-game for programming was developed in order to provide an automatic assessment of programs developed in the scope of the game.

In this case study, the developed game for the teaching of programming will be playable on mobile devices and web, and its narrative is based on adventure and location-based games. Preliminary tests were developed with students from the Master in Informatics, in order to assess the potential of this approach to the courses in Introductory programming. We have also conducted another focus group to explore the potential of this solution in other STEM areas.