Desenvolvimento de um serious game para auxiliar no aprendizado de programação

Abstract

The dropout rate in undergraduate courses in the area of technology is quite high when compared to other areas of knowledge. One of the factors that contribute to this high rate is the students' difficulty with learning programming, especially in introductory disciplines; these difficulties normally appear in the basic concepts of the discipline, such as abstraction and logic, for understanding algorithms, and functions and repetition structures, for understanding programming itself. These problems could be mitigated by teaching computational thinking in basic education classes. Proposals for curricula for this purpose, such as the CIEB, exist but they are not yet applied. In view of the difficulties of undergraduate students with learning programming, this work aims to propose and evaluate the creation of a serious game that can help in the teaching of these initial subjects in technology courses. Using tools for the development and evaluation of serious games, the work then seeks to develop the proposed game and evaluate it as a teaching tool for programming and computational thinking disciplines. The evaluations, carried out using the MEEGA+ method, were applied in computer programming classes to validate the application of the game as an aid tool in the teaching of programming and conditional structures. [resumo fornecido pelo autor]