Calangos 3: um jogo digital para o ensino de ecologia populacional

Abstract

Ecology is a important subject present in the middle and high school curriculum. But, despite its importance, it faces several challenges in its teaching and learning in the classroom. Within this context, educational games emerge as a way to motivate students to learn using the fun and exploration of these concepts in a practical and interactive experience. This dissertation describes the development and evaluation of Calangos 3, an educational game for teaching population ecology and intra and interspecific relations. This game was applied to High school students as a way to evaluate the impacts on their motivation in relation to Ecology and its themes. This analysis is quantitative and occurs on the data collected through a questionnaire applied to students after the game. This questionnaire will follow the MEEGA + model, presented by Petri et al. (2018), who developed this tool to evaluate the quality of educational games. The result of the questionnaire showed that the game was able to entertain, to draw attention and, according to the students, to convey the theoretical concepts related to ecology. Despite this, the game showed some points which need to be worked out regarding difficulty and lack of interaction. In addition to this, the game was also able to succesfully replicate the various phenomena involved in the relationships between organisms and population dynamics.