In recent years, persistent disparities in compensation and representation between genders have been revealed in various sectors, most notably in computer science and engineering. This ongoing issue accentuates a critical inequality that necessitates comprehensive and systematic actions. A significant contributing factor is women's relative lack of interest in technology and computing domains. This topic has not received ad-equate investigation in broader discussions surrounding Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. As an incentive for the retention and entrance of women in the field, initiatives have emerged in Brazil, such as the Meninas Digitais program, an extension project to encourage and support women in information technology and the sciences. These initiatives aim to combat stigmas and promote gender equality in STEM. This research aims to thoroughly analyze women's participation and performance within computing and technology programmes. The present investigation concerns the low enrollment rates of women in technology-related higher education programs, which contributes to a predominantly male workforce and exacer-bates existing gender disparities, potentially stifling technological advancement. Utilizing a decade's data from undergraduate affiliates at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), this study employed machine learning techniques to examine trends surrounding dropout rates, admissions, retention, and academic performance of female students in technology and engineering. The findings reveal that women often achieve strong academic results but remain significantly underrepresented in these fields. This scenario underscores an urgent need for targeted educational policies that foster gender equality and inclusivity. Additionally, the research identifies potential shortcomings within the Brazilian primary education system and highlights specific challenges female students face in transitioning to university life, particularly those linked to socioeconomic factors.

This paper presents the preliminary results of a systematic mapping fulfilled to identify how Game Learning Analytics (GLA) is being applied in education digital games, verifying which are the most utilized analyses and how their results are visualized. From the 348 studies returned by the search engines, only 76 of them met the defined selection criteria. We concluded that descriptive analysis is the most utilized form of GLA, followed by correlation and clusterization. Besides, line charts, bar charts, and boxplots are the visualization types that are most present in the studies.

Computational Thinking (CT) is a way to structure thinking to solve problems, which develops cognitive skills. Educational Digital Games (EDG) are a potential tool to work with CT, stimulating the student's interest and learning. Still, to make these games playable by children with Intellectual disabilities (ID), it is necessary to have adaptations suitable to their educational needs. Therefore, this paper presents the development and evaluation of the EDG “Pensar e Vestir” (PeV). This game addresses a daily life activity, the process of choosing clothes and the act of wearing them, and aims to promote the development of CT in children both neurotypical and with ID. The development process was supported by ID, Education, and Specialized Education Treatment specialists based on accessibility guidelines. In the end, there were two evaluations, firstly with the specialists and then with Computation students, to validate the functional and technical requirements. Currently, the game is in evaluation by its target audience.

Stakeholder engagement is a key aspect for the successful implementation of Learning Analytics (LA) in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Studies in Europe and Latin America (LATAM) indicate that, overall, instructors and students have positive views on LA adoption, but there are differences between their ideal expectations and what they consider realistic in the context of their institutions. So far, very little has been found about stakeholders’ views on LA in Brazilian higher education. By replicating the survey conducted in other countries, in seven Brazilian HEIs, we found convergences both with Europe and LATAM, reinforcing the need for local diagnosis and indicating the risk of assuming a ”LATAM identity”. Our findings contribute to building a corpus of knowledge on stakeholders expectations with a contextualised comprehension of the gaps between ideal and predicted scenarios, which can inform institutional policies for LA implementation in Brazil.

This work aims to map the scenario on how gamification and service design are being addressed together. Literature shows that both methodologies have advantages that can be used to improve solutions and products to support services. Through a systematic literature mapping, 406 papers were found from a search in 5 academic search engines. Among the 8 selected papers that passed a filtering step, 7 of them proposed some sort of methodology but only 6 of them mixed the approaches and only 4 papers applied these methodologies. None of the papers addressed the complete service design or gamification processes. The results indicate that a combination of both methodologies has not been fully explored in the literature.

Computational Thinking (CT) refers to cognitive skills of logical reasoning, abstraction, and problem-solving that can be automated. Students with intellectual disabilities have cognitive deficits that can be improved by working the CT. To ensure that students develop this ability it is important to use appropriate and accessible tools for everyone and educational digital games are presented as a possibility to teach CT in a fun and engaging way. The present study aims to understand the relationship between the learning of children with intellectual disabilities and the existing guidelines for the development of accessible educational digital games, to promote CT for them. Also, a set of these guidelines is provided for designing educational digital games aimed at students with intellectual disabilities.

Personalization of gamification is an alternative to overcome the shortcomings of the one-size-fits-all approach, but the few empirical studies analyzing its effects do not provide conclusive results. While many user and contextual information affect gamified experiences, prior personalized gamification research focused on a single user characteristic/dimension. Therefore, we hypothesize if a multidimensional approach for personalized gamification, considering multiple (user and contextual) information, can improve user motivation when compared to the traditional implementation of gamification. In this paper, we test that hypothesis through a mixed-methods sequential explanatory study. First, 26 participants completed two assessments using one of the two gamification designs and self-reported their motivations through the Situational Motivation Scale. Then, we conducted semi-structured interviews to understand learners' subjective experiences during these assessments. As result, the students using the personalized design were more motivated than those using the one-size-fits-all approach regarding intrinsic motivation and identified regulation. Furthermore, we found the personalized design featured game elements suitable to users' preferences, being perceived as motivating and need-supporting. Thus, informing i) practitioners on the use of a strategy for personalizing gamified educational systems that is likely to improve students' motivations, compared to OSFA gamification, and ii) researchers on the potential of multidimensional personalization to improve single-dimension strategies. For transparency, dataset and analysis procedures are available at https://osf.io/grzhp.

Gamification has been widely employed in educational contexts to improve students' engagement and enhance the learning process. In this sense, the present work investigates the impact of gamification on students' behavior and performance through learning paths, i.e., sequences of learning objects followed by students while interacting with a virtual learning environment. To achieve this, we captured, analyzed and visually represented learning paths from 139 students enrolled in an online course. As result, we observed that students using gamification interacted more with the course elements, had longer paths and better grades. The main contribution of this work is to present learning paths as a tool to investigate students' interaction in a virtual learning environment with gamified elements and to analyze these elements' impact on students' behavior and performance.

Gamification is increasingly becoming a pertinent aspect of any UI and UX design. However, a canonical dearth in research and application of gamification has been related to the role of individual differences in susceptibility to gamification and its varied designs. To address this gap, this study reviews the extant corpus of research on tailored gamification (42 studies). The findings of the review indicate that most studies on the field are mostly focused on user modeling for a future personalization, adaptation, or recommendation of game elements. This user model usually contains the users’ preferences of play (i.e., player types), and is mostly applied in educational settings. The main contributions of this paper are a standardized terminology of the game elements used in tailored gamification, the discussion on the most suitable game elements for each users’ characteristic, and a research agenda including dynamic modeling, exploring multiple characteristics simultaneously, and understanding the effects of other aspects of the interaction on user experience.

Gamification has been increasingly implemented in systems to motivate users. To assist designers in the gamification process there are several frameworks which are generic structures that serve as a basis to the gamification. Some frameworks address motivation superficially while others focus exclusively on motivation and are not broad enough for the entire process. This work presents 5W2H+M emphasized, an extension of the 5W2H framework with its motivational aspects, based on Self-Determination Theory.

Gamification has been widely employed in the educational domain over the past eight years when the term became a trend. However, the literature states that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design of gamified strategies. This paper aims to create a taxonomy for the game elements, based on gamification experts' opinions. After a brief review from existing work, we extract first the game elements from the current state of the art, and then evaluate them via a survey with 19 gamification and education experts. The resulting taxonomy taxonomy included the description of 21 game elements and their quantitative and qualitative evaluation by the experts. Overall, the proposed taxonomy was in general well accepted by most of the experts. They also suggested expanding it with the inclusion of Narrative and Storytelling game elements. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is proposing a new, confirmed taxonomy to standardise the terminology used to define the game elements as a mean to design and deploy gamification strategies in the educational domain.

Many academic works focus their studies in the socalled Serious Games (SG). Many of these games ended up being far from children's expectations, particularly when compared to conventional games. This work assesses a set of 40 guidelines for designing SG for children. Fifth nine experts concluded that most of the guidelines are of high relevance (scored above 9.0) but all of them are worth attention (scored above the middle of the scale) when designing SG for children.

Abstract Gamification applies game elements in non-game contexts to improve users’ experience. One of the contexts that have mostly taken advantage of gamification is the educational one. However, the students’ experience is unique, since it varies according to their profile. Therefore, the individualities of each student must be considered to improve the students’ experience. This paper aims to explore the gamification properties and analyze the results of the user-centered application. For this, we proposed a framework focused on the user-centered gamification in the educational context, taking into account personal, functional, psychological, temporal, playful, implementable and evaluative properties. After applying the framework in the e-learning system, the controlled experiment with 139 students revealed an increase in students’ interaction, engagement and satisfaction. Thus, our main contributions are the improvement of the students’ experience with the user-centered gamification and the definition of a framework to assist in its application. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS This paper proposes a user-centered gamification framework for educational context It has been applied in an e-learning system and a controlled experiment was conducted A total of 139 students enrolled for an online course, and half of them used the gamified version Results indicate an increase in the students’ interaction, engagement and satisfaction

Learning Analytics and Gamification are examples of some strategies that have been applied in educational context as an attempt to reduce motivational problems. While learning analytics seek to analyze learners and their contexts in order to understand and improve the teaching-learning process, gamification applies all suitable game elements in learning environments to motivate and engage students. This work aims to integrate learning analytics techniques and game elements in a virtual learning environment and verify if this integration increased students' interaction and satisfaction. Through a controlled experiment, 77 undergraduate students were divided into two groups (i.e., experimental and control) and their participation in an online course was monitored. As a result, the satisfaction was higher for the experimental group, although there was no significant difference between the groups in relation to their interaction.

Interactive Geometry software (IGS) are tools that help students to explore geometry concepts using computers. Most of IGS interfaces developed to date are heavily based on the desktop model of user interaction where the user input comes from the selection of icons and drop-down menus with the help of a mouse and a keyboard. Nevertheless, with the widespread adoption of smartphones, tablets and other devices with multitouch screens the tradition interfaces of IGS became inadequate. Thus, this study presents the development of a dictionary of gestures for interacting with IGS. It completely removes the need of icons and drop-down menus to create and manipulate geometric objects. To evaluate these gestures we implement them in an IGS for mobile device called Geotouch. Then, we conducted a usability study with five experts to compare Geotouch with other three IGS currently available. The results indicate that Geotouch has less usability problems and enable to build geometric objects faster and with fewer errors.