Utilização da ferramenta gamificada CodeCombat para o ensino de programação

Abstract

Computer programming became fundamental for current society’s functioning, creating a high demand for professionals in the field. To fulfill this demand, many courses of technical and superior level were created. A recurring problem in these courses is the high student dropout rate, being motivated by: impossibility to remain in the course for economic, vocational or institutional reasons. The objective of this research is to analyze if the use of a chosen gamified tool benefits the motivation to learn programming, by doing experiments and applying questionnaires. In this work, an analysis of tools that could be used to do experiments in programming classes was done. The choice of the tool called CodeCombat was based in the following reasons: ease of use, presence of gamified elements, use of the Python programming language and availability in Portuguese. Among the gamified elements, CodeCombat has: avatar creation, mission map, levels and achievements. After this, the planning about how the tool would be integrated to the Programming Fundamentals course taught to graduation courses in Federal University of Ceará was done. Then the experiment was designed, being applied in the first semester of 2023, using a Computer Science class as experimental group and a Software Engineering class as control group. To collect the results, the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) was used, with the goal to evaluate the students’ motivation for learning in the class after the use of the tool. With the obtained results, it was concluded that, taking in consideration the free version of the tool’s limitations, its use did not bring a big impact to the motivation of the students for the class, but the potential for using it in other ways still exists.