Marcelo Alves de Barros

Applying knowledge management in UI design process

This work describes the use of a Knowledge Management (KM) strategy to analyze the User Interface (UI) design process. This analisys approach produced: (i) an ontology to the UI design process and (ii) a new transforming approach to produce an interaction description from task description. The ontology is based on the definition of task and interaction metamodels. The new transforming approach defines an automatic mechanism to convert a description in another one. It is based on these metamodels and on a scenic metaphor. This transformation preserves the structural and temporal decomposition of the tasks, makes its context explicit and maintains the coherence between the descriptions. This new approach redefines the appropriate time for ergonomic and/or project rules usage on UI design process.

Marketplace-Driven, Game-Changing IT Games to Address Complex, Costly Community Problems

This chapter illustrates how digital marketplaces may be allied to gamified IT applications/systems to support solutions for complex, costly community challenges in a sustainable manner. A generic modular architectural design for these marketplace‐based games is proposed and instantiated to public health and water management problem scenarios so that the resulting games support expected solutions. Preliminary validation studies of the games’ usefulness as a solution‐support and business‐promotion tool have been carried out for the cases of a game to combat disease‐carrying mosquitoes and of a water conservation game. These games have then been applied to real‐case scenarios pilot tests. The chapter reports on validation results and the contribution the embedded marketplaces may bring to these games and their sustainability.

ReadAct - Alternate Reality, Serious Games for Reading-Acting to Engage Population and Schools on Social Challenges.

This paper presents a gamified empowerment approach to train future teachers. The approach aims to innovate teaching strategies and to provide a system which motivates players to read and to apply acquired knowledge towards actions to address social challenges within their community. The approach is supported by an alternate reality serious game called “ReadAct” which blends reading instruction with opportunities to act on social responsibility in the real world. Validation results are offered for experiments with the ReadAct approach in different but related contexts of drama reading, environmental education and introduction to computing. Results provide evidence that ReadAct motivates players (young readers) to engage themselves and to attract their schools’ and families’ communities to act on social challenges. The underlying challenges in the experiments are water conservation, urban violence and bullying at school. The paper contributes to the literature on computer-based educat ion by indicating how a ReadAct game may turn the school community, where it is played out, into a community school with an integrated view of academics and social services.

Teaching of Programming - An Educational Performance Booster for Students at Economically Disadvantaged Schools.

The technological advances made in recent years bring with them the importance of introducing computer courses in the school context, and with this, a need for digital inclusion of students from economically disadvantaged schools. This paper reports on research to introduce programming in such school curricula and to evaluate possible benefits of such introduction for students’ motivation towards learning in general. The research was based on the creation of a methodology for designing and offering programming courses at public and private schools and to verify possible correlations between students’ performance and schools’ economic scenarios they find themselves in. Preliminary results indicate that students who participated in the courses at schools with economic restrictions and inferior quality of IT infrastructure may still present better results in the courses. In addition, there is evidence of gains in their motivation towards learnig other subjects. The paper details results, analyzes causes for them and illustrates and explores implications for participating students at schools operating across the economic spectrum.

Designing Gamified E-Learning Applications for Children with Down's Syndrome - The Case of Teaching Literacy and Language Skills.

Down’s syndrome (DS) is the most common genetic cause of intellectual disability worldwide, with language being one of the most affected area. Language skills and literacy acquisition thus require special care. It is still rare to use software to support such care while, simultaneously, providing education and entertainment. This paper presents results of research on the design of gamified software applications to support pedagogical processes of literacy and language acquisition, making them fun, motivating and effective for children with DS. The paper analyses rankings of design domains of gamified e-learning applications done earlier in the research according to pedagogical benefits in entertaining education of DS children. The paper is believed to offer contributions to requirements engineering of e-learning, gamified software applications in general and to computer-assisted education of DS children in particular. The paper directly contributes to the concretization of article 24 (access to Education) of the General Principles, Accessibility, of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). Usage of applications that implement most beneficial requirements may also indirectly contribute to UNCRPD article 19 –Living independently and being included in the community; article 21 – access to Information and communication services; and, article 27 Work and employment.

Gamification in Location-based M-Learning: Students' Perceptions of Game Elements.

Applications for Mobile-Learning, used in conjunction with strategies based on games, provide new opportunities for the learning process in the physical and virtual worlds. Although previous works evaluated location-based mobile applications (and its variations), most of them focused almost entirely on specific metrics, leaving the player’s perspective aside. This paper presents study results for the evaluation of mLearning applications from the students’ perspective regarding the learning experience based on location and the game elements that might make the learning process more appealing to them. The study collected major game elements from the literature and applied questionnaires to 53 students from public high schools (junior high) in two states of Northeast Brazil. The results suggest that the majority of students have interest in this learning approach and consider most of the analysed game elements important to promote learning motivation, even though there are elements that are not as appealing. The paper contributes to the design of gamified location-based m-Learning applications in the sense that it provides insight into the importance of their requirements players perceive and may thus, serve as a guide for such applications versioning.

AquaGuardians: a tutorial-based education game for population engagement in water management

Water management has mainly been dealt with by research institutions and governments with little engagement from schools, teachers and the population at large. This paper describes AQUAGUARDIANS (AG), an alternate reality, serious game for tutored education. The game offers a cultural environment to engage communities and, hopefully, crowds in water management by means of multimedia reading and writing experiences in virtual-real world scenarios. AG combines: a) gamified entertainment experiences; b) artistic production ‘coopetitions’ of individual or collective cultural representations of water by multimedia communications; and, c) effective actions to save, preserve and monitor community water resources. Applications of AG in two cities suffering from severe water crises in Northeastern Brazil provide preliminary evidence the game improves (learning and water management) success indicators defined by schools and water management agencies.

Anaís: A Conceptual Framework for Blended Active Learning in Healthcare

The guarantee of the right to quality education is a fundamental principle for policy and management education. In addition to the organizational processes and regulation, as well as for citizenship, currently the student satisfaction plays a key role for the adequacy of actual courses and the needs of the educational community who depend on them. This way, interest on active methodologies has intensified with the emergence of new strategies that may favour the autonomy of students. Active Learning (AL) becomes an important strategy in healthcare to the extent that theory and practice go hand in hand in the training of health experts. This paper proposes a conceptual framework (Anais) for active learning in healthcare studies and summarizes a qualitative research with healthcare experts and students on the feasibility and applicability of Anais and its potentially positive results. Statistical tests and descriptive analysis of the collected data indicate Anais could indeed bring a contribution to the healthcare area in terms of benefits to use it as an AL tool for professional training of physicians and other healthcare professionals and specialists.