Informatics in Education

This research discusses the use of a gamified web platform for studying software modeling with Unified Modeling Language (UML). Although UML is constantly being improved and studied, many works show that there is difficulty in teaching and learning the subject, due to the complexity of its concepts and the students' cognitive difficulties with abstraction. There are challenges for instructors to find different pedagogical strategies to teach modeling. The platform proposed allowed students to complement their UML knowledge in an environment with game elements. From the results, it can be concluded that the platform obtained great acceptance and satisfaction of use. Most of the students participating in the research were satisfied with the usability of the platform, reporting a feeling of contribution of the tool to studying the content, in addition to pointing out the satisfaction of using gamification as a pedagogical strategy.

The paper argues for the importance of the constructivist learning theory to software development education. Constructivism frames learning less as the product of passive transmission than a process of active construction whereby learners construct their own knowledge based upon prior knowledge and experience. Now that a number of software development courses offer project-based teaching, it seems that the importance of a constructivist perspective has been implicitly well-taken in the current practice. What these approaches explicitly lack is a concrete methodology of how to carry out the constructivist perspective and its consequences for learning. This paper reports on a constructivist approach to object-oriented software development at the undergraduate level. It explores methodological aspects of the approach and discusses the results from its evaluation.