Banca de DEFESA: ROBSON RAABI DO NASCIMENTO

GAME ELEMENTS USED IN GAMIFIED ACTIVITIES FOR STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AND THE ENERGY CONCEPT CONSTRUCTION PROCESS

Physics Education; High School; Gamification; Student Engagement; Meaning Making; Energy.

Students who realize that the knowledge they have learned establishes cultural connections with their daily lives feel more motivated and engaged in educational activities. Since schools experience tension between cultural maintenance and transformation, students often perceive school knowledge as uninteresting. With the advent of cyberculture, a cultural phenomenon called gamification emerged. Gamification is defined as the use of game elements in a non-game context. It was initially used in a marketing context to build customer loyalty and has since been used in an instructional and educational context. Gamification has been used in Physics teaching as a tool to stimulate students' motivation to learn. However, motivation is a psychological characteristic that is difficult to observe because it is more individual. For this reason, we decided to observe student engagement in this thesis. Despite being a psychological characteristic, it has a more social character. Student engagement can be defined as the amount of time and physical and mental effort that a student chooses to invest in an activity that promotes their learning. Therefore, it is important to remember that student engagement is a cultural and multidimensional characteristic that is related to the student's motivation for learning and their own learning. Additionally, we understand that learning is associated with the construction of meanings of scientific concepts, with the concept of energy being selected for this thesis. The concept of energy is an interdisciplinary concept, structuring and guiding all school Physics, in addition to presenting sociocultural, scientific and technological aspects that can be contextualized in the students' culture. Thus, we aim to analyze how game elements, used in gamified activities, influence student engagement and the process of constructing meanings of the scientific concept of energy. To achieve this goal, we developed a participatory research. The research was carried out following all the protocols for coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, seeking to protect the confidentiality of the participants, following the guidelines of the UFRPE ethics committee. As data production instruments, we used participant observation and semi-structured interviews, which were analyzed based on implicative statistical analysis and content analysis. Therefore, the results of this research indicated that game elements used in gamified activities, such as cooperation and immediate feedback, influence student engagement and the process of constructing meanings of the concept of energy through different types of mediators, such as peer mediation and teacher mediation. However, it is worth noting that the game elements used in gamification, the type of gamification and the form of the activities are planned so that they make sense to students in their diverse sociocultural aspects.