Recomendações para promover o engajamento em jogos digitais educacionais

Abstract

Educational games have been more used each day as valuable tools to help education. Unfortunately, educational games have many limitations relationed to budget and development teams, wich may result in unattractive games to the target audience. One of the main elements to a successful educational game is the engagement. To develop engaging games without sacrificing the educational objectives is an important requirement in the making of educational games. Therefore, this research has as objective, to define a set of design recommendations to the development of more engaging educational games, considering a diverse target audience. To do so, the first step was to conduct a systematic mapping of the literature about recommendations for engaging games and related tools. Relating the found concepts, it was possible to create a initial recommendation gruoup that was later refined with the help of researchers, experts on the field of educational games and also voluntary teachers. The final recommendation group has 76 items sorted by their process step, provided engaging element, benefited player groups, implementation complexity and professional type who has to fulfill them (including developers and teachers). To evaluate the developed recommendation group, a educational game from the Learning Objects Laboratory (LOL) was adapted following the recommendations and used in a case study that applied the game with students from middle school and high school. Said study compared the students’ evaluation and engagement in each version of the game. Through observation and the tools Egameflow (SHU-HUI; WANN-YIH; DENNISON, 2018) and SAM (HAYASHI et al., 2016), and interviews, the adapted version stood out for its higher conclusion rate, in addition to a higher mean of grades in the evaluations. Besides that, when interviewed, the voluntary teachers reported a improvement in the customization and application process when following the created recommendations. Therefore, it was possible to update the state of art about engaging educational games when observing that the recommendation group created had a positive influence over the development, cutomization and application process to provide engaging experiences with educational games.