Ambiente virtual de aprendizagem baseado em gamificação: um estudo de caso em probabilidade e estatística

Abstract

Nowadays, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) lead us to major changes in society including cultural, economic and social aspects. This influences the academic environments and changes the relation between the new generations and learning. As a result, the new generations increases the demand to friendly learning environments that uses ICT and motivate students to expand their classroom theoretical knowledge providing autonomy. This scenario motivate the construction of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) whose purpose is to connect the students to their classroom discipline, encouraging them to spend more time in learning activities. The incentives to encourage students' involvement was made through the gamification technique, i.e., the insertion of game design elements in non-game contexts. To enable the VLE construction, a methodological process was built to unite software development process, interface and usability patterns and digital games construction. Finally, to measure the influence of the VLE, a case study scenario was proposed using the Probability and Statistics discipline of a undergraduate course. Students was analyzed through three variables: attitude towards statistics; user's involvement; academic performance. The results proved that the students were influenced in the three analyzed variables. In attitude towards statistics, there were changes in some behavioral components and students improved their attitudes when compared with literature historical records. In involvement variable, the gamification elements proves to be effective influencing students' behavior and guiding their actions. In academic performance, there were significant correlation between VLE and discipline performance, however others issues may affect this variable and being difficult to establish a causal relationship of these issues. Given the analyzed variables, we concluded that there are several contributions that a gamified Virtual Learning Environment can bring to learning environments, especially when ICT is used to involve this new generations of learners in the Probability and Statistics field.