Pingo - um portal de jogos educativos infantis com conteúdo customizável pelo professor

Abstract

Games evoke behaviors in their players that are favorable to learning, such as persistence, risk-taking, attention to detail and problem solving skills. However, educational digital games are not always accepted and used in the school environment. One reason for this is the difficulty or impossibility to adapt them to the pedagogical objectives necessary to support teaching in the classroom. In this context, our project aims to reduce the gap between the syllabus used by the teacher and the fixed educational content in most games, through an online portal that provides mechanisms for customization of specific instructional content for each game offered. This project also proposes to solve other problems, such as low graphics quality (common in this type of games) and lack of time in schools for activities involving games. The portal, named Pingo, enables developers to insert their games, implemented through the Unity 3D game engine, defining which contents may be customized by teachers. Teachers can define the specific content for games and associate them with groups of students. Students interact with games in a playful way while exercising the content that was defined by the teacher. The portal was defined as a model of meta-design since game developers and teachers design parts of the game through the portal. At Pingo, game designers define the content customizations allowed, whereas teachers perform the desired content customization. Two preliminary evaluations were applied to this portal. The first one analyzed the communicability with the different users profile, through an inspection method. In the second evaluation performed, teachers belonging to the potential users group of the system contributed to it. These evaluations made possible to identify positive and negative aspects in the portal, and enabled the definition of the next steps necessary to its improvement.