Uso de técnicas de gamificação na aprendizagem do pensamento computacional em disciplinas introdutórias à programação

Abstract

Evasion is a problem that affects educational institutions in general, especially those of higher education. In addition, about 80% of the students evaded belong to courses in the area of exact. The evasion registers the highest occurrence in the initial semesters of undergraduate courses. In the course of Bachelor of Information Systems of UTFPR, for example, there is a higher occurrence of dropouts in the first two periods of the course. Among the main reasons, it stands out the teaching-learning relationship. It is known that, for courses in the area of computing, computational thinking is essential for the development and advancement of students in the course. In addition, it is also known that teach computational thinking is a challenge in introductory programming teaching. Aiming to facilitate the teaching of computational thinking, some authors have used, in the teachinglearning process, game mechanics, an approach known as Gamification. The present work analyzes the impacts of the use of Gamification techniques in the teaching-learning process. For that, an experiment was carried out, with undergraduate students enrolled in the Computing discipline, in which Gamification techniques were used in the teaching of computational thinking in 5 meetings. At the end of the experiment, results were collected and it was possible to identify that about 58% of the students felt motivated to participate in the experiment with the use of Gamification techniques. Each technique used (ranking, challenges, competition, punctuation, awards and choice of evaluation criteria) mostly positively impacted students’ motivation, with the exception of choosing punctuation criteria. Thus, it is concluded that the use of Gamification techniques positively and negatively impacts the students, and that the use of each technique should be planned considering the possible impacts, considering the context of the course and student in which the techniques will be used.