JOGO EDUCATIVO DIGITAL COMO APOIO NO PROCESSO DE CONSTRUÇÃO DO CONHECIMENTO: POSSIBILIDADES E POTENCIALIDADE AO ENSINO DE SISTEMAS DE TELECOMUNICAÇÕES

Abstract

This study aims to verify the effectiveness of using Learning Objects, in this case Digital Learning Game (DLG), as a support gadget in the construction of knowledge process in the school subject Telecommunication Systems. As an investigation subject were invited 25 students of Professional and Technological Education class, on secondary level of Technical Course in Electronics. These students studied at a federal institution on Brazil southeast area. As regards to teaching/learning process, this study was built on the work of Vygotski (1991), focused on socio-cultural and historical perspective, and also based on Zone of Proximal Development, relating it with full education concept as well, looking at the work as an educational principle argued by authors such as: Moura (2007), Ramos (2007), and, Frigotto and Ciavatta (2012). The methodology of this study was an applied survey, objective/descriptive, the nature of the quantitative data, and trial design. Afterwards a didactic exhibition of Fundamentals of Optical Communication the main focus was ascertain, by using a test questionnaire, if the students of experimental group (the one which DLG was applied) would get better results than the monitoring group (this group only answered a questionnaire printed on paper containing similar to DLG questions). After the treatment of the results, graphs were generated comparing the grade averages per question and for total grade, of each one of the groups, in the pre-test and post-test phase. The visual analysis of these graphs indicated that the average results obtained by the experimental group were superior to those of the monitoring group. In order to verify the existence of statistical significance in the average difference of grades between pre-test and post-test, in both groups we performed the t-test for difference between means for dependent samples, with a one sided distribution on the left. The test indicated that the standardized test statistic t was in the rejection region for both the control and experimental groups, thus the null hypothesis was rejected. Therefore, at a significance level of 5%, it was considered that the results presented regarding the differences in means were appropriate to support the research. Comparing the average scores of the experimental group obtained in the pre-test and post-test, it was observed that there was a percentage increase of approximately 20.64% in the average of the post-test. In the monitoring group, there was a percentage increase of only 8%. Therefore, the study suggests that the use of DLG was an effective tool to aid in the process of mediation of knowledge construction. The methodology for creating Learning Objects used in this study was INTERA, based on the work of Braga (2015a). To build the DLG the software used was the Unity game engine. Additionally this study presents the assessment of the quality of the game created, based on the EGameFlow instrument (FU et al., 2009).