Uso de enredos altamente imersivos em sistemas gamificados para aumentar o engajamento de alunos de Introdução à Programação

Abstract

The CodeBench system is an online judge created with the purpose of automating the correction of programming exercises in the disciplines of the Computing Institute at UFAM. In order to increase student engagement in the use of this system, a gamification platform called CodePlay was created and incorporated in 2018. In on initial version, based on mechanics and elements of multiplayer RPG games, each student saw themselves as a character in a kingdom plagued by an underground monster called Chimera. However, after conducting experiments, it was found that CodePlay was still unable to generate a significant difference in the performance of students in Programming disciplines. In this project, we hypothesized that one of the reasons for this result was the disconnection between programming activities and the storyline adopted in CodePlay. Therefore, this project aimed to increase engagement by integrating programming activities with the narratives of the game. To achieve this, a new storyline was proposed and implemented for CodePlay, with a variety of new elements that allowed it to work, with the objective of providing an immersion that goes beyond the boundaries of the game and extends to the motivated activities.