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.

This study aims to explore how gamification elements influence the development of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) in an online project-based programming course conducted on Facebook. We formed student groups by using a quasi-experimental design from students studying in the computer science department. While both courses were project-based, the experimental group's project development process was enriched with gamification elements. We collected data from the CoI survey, transcript analysis of online discussions, and interviews with students. The results indicated that the use of gamification elements contributed significantly to students' social, cognitive, and teaching presence development. Besides, while a high level of CoI perception was created in both groups in the online project-based learning environment, the design and organization role of the instructor came to the fore in the gamified environment more.

The rapid development of technology in today’s times make business’ survival a rather complex task. It is therefore necessary for the specialized organization and administration of each company to differentiate and strengthen its competitive advantages. Gamification is an established practice in many business domains and can enforce employees to engage in business processes and change aspects of their behavior. Even though numerous gamification patterns that are described in literature have been used so far by businesses to various working environments, the outcomes were not the best possible that we would expect in terms of their right utilization to business non-game contexts. Thus, there is need for concise gamification patterns that can offer right guidance to game designers in business. Gamification design patterns can provide a distilled knowledge of techniques of how to design object-oriented software. This paper aims to address this gap in existing literature by describing new gamification design patterns, classifying them according to specific criteria and providing new information to this research domain. Our study is a descriptive literature review and is based on review of previous works. This descriptive literature review tries to give a better understanding by proposing new gamification design patterns in the continuously evolving research domain of gamification design patterns.

The contents taught in the programming subjects have a great relevance in the formation of computing students. However, these subjects are characterized by high failure rates, as they require logical reasoning and mathematical knowledge. Thus, establishing knowledge through the subject of algorithms can help students to overcome these difficulties and absorb the contents and skills required. Thus, this work aims to present and discuss the results of a second experiment on the application of a teaching plan composed of several active methodologies (Virtual Learning Environments, Coding Dojo, Gamification, Problem-Based Learning, Flipped Classroom and Serious Games) in an algorithms subject. Based on this experiment, it was evaluated whether there were learning gains compared to the learning acquired with the traditional method. Finally, an analysis was performed using the two-tailed Student-t approach, used for independent samples, which presented statistically significant results.