Aprendizagem baseada em jogos digitais RPG no ensino superior: uma experiência na disciplina de ecologia

Abstract

The prejudiced scenario constructed by the mass media that digital games are seen as promoters of violence, trivial, electronic nannies and that promote sedentarism has distanced these cultural artifacts from educational spaces. With regard to universities, mostly consolidated under traditional learning perspectives, talking about digital games is synonymous with waste of time and infantilization. However, scientific research on the object has shown the opposite, indicating that games have relevance in learning processes, including in higher education and in different areas of knowledge. In this relationship between games and university learning, however, the systematic literature review (SLR) carried out in this thesis demonstrated that no study involving digital RPG games in the learning of the discipline Ecology in a face-to-face context was found, so that we propose to fill this gap. Thus, the question that guided this study was: how can the development process of a digital RPG game influence the learning of an Ecology content in the context of classroom classes at a university? The thesis we support is that the process of creating a digital RPG game influences the learning of academic content from mediation, collaboration, creation of history and narratives, creation of characters and dialogue with other media. The general objective of this study was to investigate how the process of creating a digital RPG game can influence the learning of an Ecology content in the context of face-to-face classes at a university. For this purpose, we use the methodological approach of qualitative research with an outline in pedagogical action research, developed together with a professor from a Brazilian university and fifteen undergraduate students in Biological Sciences. The data collection instruments were interviews, focus group, participant observation and questionnaires. We used the content analysis technique to analyze the data of the interviews and focus group, as well as the recordings made in the field. As a result, the study revealed that the RPG genre influences learning through social interactions by promoting collaboration and mediation during the creative process and experimentation of the game, as well as through the creation of the story, allowing students to reflect on the contents in this process, by the characters creation, as they build a projective identity that involves them in the narrative of the game and the dialogue with other media, since students carry out research in other media and are inspired by ideas of films with biological themes to exercise creativity, a typical activity performed in the RPG genre. The cognitive gains around the academic content worked on and the reflections made by the teacher and students at the end of the learning process reinforce and further clarify how the RPG genre influences this process.