Gamificação com foco em narrativa e relações com o saber de estudantes: uma experiência no ensino superior

Abstract

This research was born with the intent of contributing to the construction of theoretical and practical subsidies for the advancement of gamification as a strategy used in educational environments, to provide good learning experiences. As an empirical experience for this study, a gamification strategy that could make use of the narrative element was structured, which has always been widely considered in the study of digital games but is still relatively less explored in gamification strategies. This experience took place in the Digital Modeling discipline, during the second semester of 2020, in which 18 undergraduate students from the Digital Creation and Digital Games courses participated. The narrative was stitched together with other elements of gamification and designed to enable the externalization of relationships with knowledge from the students, from the perspective of Bernard Charlot, through metacognitive provocations placed in the challenges proposed by the gamification strategy, so that each student was asked to externalize small narratives about the challenges and activities proposed during the course. To structure the narrative around this strategy and contribute to the construction of meaning and the intended mobilization, it was chosen to use Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, more specifically in the synthesized version by Christopher Vogler, in the book "The Writer's Journey". This structure also ended up serving as a way of organizing the writing of this thesis itself, which is divided into 12 chapters that follow the steps of the hero's journey, observing the structure of a scientific work, outlined by the action research method, from the perspective of Thiollent. Thus, the path taken is based on the following question: how can a gamification strategy focused on narrative evidence relationships with students' knowledge and metacognitive processes, to mobilize them for learning? After the empirical experience in the undergraduate course, a focus group was held with some of the students, whose transcript was analyzed using the Discursive Textual Analysis method, along with the narratives created throughout the semester by the students. From this, the analysis units were classified into three emerging categories, inspired by archetypes of the hero's journey: the Hero, the Anti-hero and the Shadow. The first represents the ideal student, protagonist of his own story. The second represents the student who wants to optimize their results, not failing in the journey, but also not experiencing a good learning experience. The third is the one who faces difficulties, both external and internal, that harm their learning process. From this classification, it was possible to observe collective movements that demonstrate a gradual increase in the perception of learning throughout the semester. At the individual level, the strategy proves to be appropriate to identify more quickly students who do not mobilize and who need other actions from the teacher. Through the theoretical seam between the concepts of gamification, narrative, learning, relationship with knowledge, and metacognition, this research aims to contribute to a more humanistic view of gamification, capable of collaborating with the construction of good learning experiences and with the formation of protagonist individuals that are also more aware of their journeys to learn. [resumo fornecido pelo autor]