O chatbot de inteligência artificial como mediador da aprendizagem no contexto do Ensino Profissional: conceção, implementação e avaliação de um protótipo funcional

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increasingly established itself as a technology with significant transformative potential in education, enabling the development of solutions that support more personalized, adaptive, and efficient teaching and learning processes. In this context, educational chatbots have emerged as natural language-based conversational agents capable of supporting learning, facilitating access to information, and complementing teachers' pedagogical mediation. Traditionally, teachers rely on Learning Management Systems (LMS), such as Google Classroom or Moodle, to provide educational content, resources, and organizational information. Despite their relevance, these platforms present limitations in terms of interactivity, personalization, and immediacy of response, often requiring users to navigate multiple sections to access specific information. Such limitations become particularly evident in vocational education contexts, which are characterized by a strong practical component, intensive learning rhythms, and a high demand for continuous support. The subject of Programação e Sistemas de Informação (PSI), integrated into the Vocational Course in Técnico de Gestão e Programação de Sistemas Informáticos, exemplifies these challenges. Its extensive curricular structure, distributed across multiple modules over three years and supported by a substantial workload, generates a high volume of interactions between students and teachers related to problem clarification, exercise and project development, autonomous study organization, and the understanding of assessment criteria. However, immediate support cannot always be ensured, especially outside regular class hours, which may hinder learning progression and student autonomy. Within this framework, educational chatbots based on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing emerge as virtual assistants with high potential in vocational education, providing immediate support, guidance for autonomous study, formative feedback, and continuous assistance beyond school hours. Consequently, the implementation of an educational chatbot in the Programming and Information Systems subject represents an opportunity to make learning contents more accessible, dynamic, and interactive, to strengthen student autonomy, to optimize pedagogical communication, and to support the teacher's role as a learning mediator, in alignment with current trends in digital education and the scientific literature in the field. This study adopts a Design-Based Research approach, focused on the development and evaluation of an educational chatbot prototype aimed at mediating learning in a vocational education context.