Investigação sobre gamificação em disciplinas introdutórias de programação

Abstract

Context: Programming introduction courses are considered difficult and challenging by newcomer students. Feedback and motivation to study are important factors for students to engage with these courses. Several courses are implemented in virtual learning environments, one of these types are MOOC, massive open online courses. Usually, MOOC are offered in MOOC platform, being these courses in any area, including in Computing. A technique used to improve student learning is gamification, consisting of using game design elements in non-game context. Objective: The objective of this work was to propose and implement game design elements as gamification for introductory programming courses, motivating students to develop code with quality and correctness in evaluative activities. The implementation of gamification was coupled with a MOOC platform, more specifically, the Open edX open source platform. Method: The first step to the method was the choice of a MOOC platform, in which the proposed gamification was implemented. Once the MOOC platform was defined, it was necessary to propose and choose game design elements that could be used as the element of competition among students. To evaluate the gamification along the MOOC platform, an introductory course of programming was prepared and offered. Using the A/B test technique, for each activity in the MOOC platform, a different group of students solved the activity with gamification and the other part without the gamification, thus offering a greater reliability for the results. Finally, at the end of the course, a questionnaire was given to the participating students to characterize the motivation, and to obtain feedback on the selected game design elements and how the gamification was proposed. Results: For the first research question, which refers to the difference between performing activities with gamification and without gamification, it was not possible to obtain a satisfactory answer. In the second research question, analyzing the students’ submissions and their positions in the ranking, we observed that the gamification can be an auxiliary factor in the correction of the solutions. And in the third question, obtaining the opinion of the students in the experiment, the gamification, with the competitiveness, motivated the delivery of the solutions of the activities in the platform. Conclusions: In this work was implemented a gamified MOOC with a competition mechanism that was able to motivate students to perform code with quality and correctness. It was also possible to notice that the elements used can facilitate the correction of the solutions by the teacher. Although, given the results presented according to the experiment carried out, it is necessary to add new elements to the gamification, mainly a way to guide the student to the understanding of the gamified MOOC.