Armando Maciel Toda

Interactive Data Structure Learning Platform

The advent in technology in the past few years allowed an improvement in the educational area, as the increasing in the development of educational system. One of the techniques that emerged in this lapse is called Gamification, defined as the utilization of video game mechanics outside its bounds. Researchers in this area found positive results in the application of these concepts in several areas from marketing to education. In education, there are researches that covers from elementary to higher education, with many variations to adequate to the educators methodologies. Among higher education, focusing on IT courses, Data Structures can be considered an important subject to be taught, as they are base for many systems. Based on the exposed this paper describes the development and implementation of an interactive web learning environment, called DSLEP (Data Structure Learning Platform), to support students in higher education IT courses. The system includes basic concepts taught on this discipline as stacks, queues, lists, arrays, trees and was implemented to receive new ones. The system is also implemented with gamification concepts, as points, levels, and leader boards, to motivate students in the learning process and stimulate self-learning.

A Web System for Solving Real Problems Involving Partial Differential Equations in Generalized Coordinates

Numerical simulations based on partial differential equations are applied to different knowledge areas. There was a motivation for the use of computational tools to perform real and numerical simulations, however many of these are restricted to a software installation and limiting processing, mainly in mobile devices. The aim of this study was to develop a web system which is able to solve real problems involving partial differential equations in 2D generalized coordinates, by the finite difference discretization. The system consists of web service for client-server communication, a database, a module of processing calculation (back-end) and a graphical user interface (front-end). The system can be executed on devices regardless their performance, such as personal computers and mobile devices, since the calculations are made on a remote server. The contribution is the availability of a web architecture for including other types of differential equations and consequently, for real problems and situations, such as energy conduction and pollutant transportation.

An approach for planning and deploying gamification concepts with social networks within educational contexts

Abstract Gamification planning has been a topic of discussion in the last years since it can be used to increase performance, engagement, and motivation of end users. When properly applied in educational settings, gamification can lead to better learning. Furthermore, it can be boosted when tied to social networks. However, according to the literature, there are three main concerns regarding this topic: (a) instructors and teachers does not have the resources to plan and develop gamification strategies into their classes; (b) gamification needs a systematic approach to achieve the desired positive results; and (c) inexistence of systematic approaches that connect and help in the design of gamification and social network tasks within these contexts. Thus, this work proposes a solution to help instructors and teachers to plan and deploy gamification concepts with social network features in learning environments. In this paper, we detailed our approach depicting the set of items to analyze and compare it with other solutions that are focused on education. Then, it was conducted a case study over a programming course (N = 40) to analyze the planning and deployment phases. Our results demonstrated that our approach is the first to consider the stakeholders (i.e. instructors and teachers) as part of the process. Moreover, even though there are still some obstacles to overcome, the gamified strategies that were created achieved positive acceptance among the students and professor.

Plataforma de Recursos Educacionais Abertos: Uma Arquitetura de Referência com Elementos de Gamificação

Plataformas de Recursos Educacionais Abertos (REAs) sao sistemas que centralizam e auxiliam na distribuicao destes materiais, com base nos 4Rs (Revisao, Remixagem, Reuso e Redistribuicao). Entretanto, faltam mecanismos nos sistemas atuais para motivar e engajar discentes e docentes no reuso e redistribuicao desses materiais. Este trabalho apresenta uma Arquitetura de Referencia (AR) com elementos de gamificacao para o estabelecimento de plataformas que incentivem os usuarios a interagirem com o sistema. A AR foi construida sobre um modelo de Cliente-Servidor e foi avaliada por especialistas do dominio da gamificacao, por meio de um checklist. Os resultados demonstram que a AR foi bem aceita pelos especialistas de dominio para os requisitos de Interoperabilidade e Seguranca, contendo alguns itens que necessitam ser abordados na evolucao da AR, como disponibilidade e performance.

SSIE: An Automatic Data Extractor for Sports Management in Athletics Modality

Sports management concerns the organization of sport results and modalities information and statistical analysis by professionals. However, these information scattered around the web or organized by sport events which difficult the prospection of sport talents and the textual information are unstructured or semi-structured. This work proposes a Summary Sport Information Extraction System (SSIE) to generate a summary of statistics of the athletics modality by the automatic information extraction of documents retrieved from web. These documents are converted in textual information and classified using Naive Bayes learning method, according to sport type. After the documents retrieval and classification, text segmentation/tokenization, corpus annotation and entity/subset recognition by chunking were used to generate data frames in parse trees structure. The parse trees information are stored in a database, from which was possible to summary projection and big data analyzing over the web. The main contribution of this work was the clustering of huge amount of data spread on the web, useful for sports management.

Utilizing gamification with social network to aid students in programming languages lessons in higher education IT courses (abstract only)

Programming Languages and its uses play a vital role in IT higher education courses, because it is necessary that students have a good understanding in order to become full fledged developers. We made a study to verify the initial reception of this method regarding the students satisfaction and so, this meta-paper proposes the continuation of this research. It involves the utilization of a Social Network and gamification concepts, like badges, points, levels and leader boards to improve students participation.

A Gamified Online System to Aid in Math Lessons of Junior and Middle High Students

This paper describes the project of an online platform to aid Brazilian students, of junior and middle high, in Math lessons and also training for Olimpíada Brasileira de Matemáticadas Escolas Públicas (OBMEP). The system allows the learners to solve random generated problems divided in three main themes, that are also covered by OBMEP, which are: Arithmetic, Geometry and Combinatorial. It is also programmed to give points and achievements according to the student progress. The system aims to make the students solve a certain number of problems in order to understand the algorithms and logic behind them. Those problems were chosen and classified with the aid of math teachers. This selection process consists in analyzing certain properties, which are described below. This system is also implemented with gamification concepts to engage students in the problem-solving activities.