A virtual Game-Based Tournament of Chemistry was developed as an alternative to the traditional problem-solving classes to aid students in reviewing and understanding organic acidity and basicity concepts. The tournament was based on a multilingual virtual board game (English, Portuguese, French, and Italian) which aimed to facilitate students' interaction and collaborative learning in an enjoyable activity. The findings showed that students who participated in the tournament had better outcomes in the exams compared to those who partook in traditional problem-solving classes.
This paper presents a piece of educational software covering a comprehensive number of topics of chemical kinetics, which is available free of charge in Portuguese and English. The software was developed to support chemistry educators and students in the teaching–learning process of chemical kinetics by using animations, calculations, and simulations. Furthermore, this software was thoroughly evaluated by several chemistry educators from many universities in Brazil and abroad; they agreed the software has comprehensive content, is easy to use, and should be employed along with textbooks.
O artigo avalia a atualidade das diretrizes de usabilidade propostas por Jakob Nielsen no livro "Homepage Usabilidade: 50 Websites Desconstruídos". Por meio de um estudo de caso, analisou-se as páginas iniciais de três sites: YouTube, Facebook e Amazon. O objetivo foi verificar se as diretrizes de Nielsen ainda são relevantes e aplicadas. Os resultados revelaram que muitas das. diretrizes propostas são ainda relevantes e seguidas pelos sites avaliados. No entanto, também foram identificadas diretrizes que não são seguidas e algumas respostas divergentes. Conclui-se que as diretrizes de Nielsen continuam sendo uma referência importante no design de interfaces digitais, mas é necessário considerar as particularidades do contexto atual e adaptá-las conforme as necessidades dos usuários. Espera-se que esses resultados auxiliem os profissionais da área a desenvolverem interfaces mais intuitivas, eficientes e satisfatórias para os usuários, contribuindo para a melhoria da experiência de navegação na web. Palavras-Chave: usabilidade, página inicial, diretrizes, Nielsen e design de interfaces.
Intermolecular forces are a useful concept that can explain the attraction between particulate matter as well as numerous phenomena in our lives such as viscosity, solubility, drug interactions, and dyeing of fibers.However, studies show that students have difficulty understanding this important concept, which has led us to develop a free educational software in English and Portuguese.The software can be used interactively by teachers and students, thus facilitating better understanding.Professors and students, both graduate and undergraduate, were questioned about the software quality and its intuitiveness of use, facility of navigation, and pedagogical application using a Likert scale.The results led to the conclusion that the developed computer application can be characterized as an auxiliary tool to assist teachers in their lectures and students in their learning process of intermolecular forces.
This report details the design of an online trilingual (English, French, and Portuguese) interactive virtual board game and its implementation at the Federal University of Ceará in Brazil. It was used as a fun alternative to assist chemistry and pharmacy undergraduate students in reviewing introductory concepts to organic reactions: enthalpy, entropy, Gibbs free energy, chemical equilibrium, chemical kinetics, nucleophiles, electrophiles, and reactive intermediates. Also, learners positively evaluated the game as an alternative method to conventional educational strategies for reviewing the content related to chemical reactivity.
We designed the current gamification strategy for an undergraduate introductory organic chemistry course to enhance the student engagement. We implemented it in two classes from the Pharmacy and Chemistry courses using several gaming elements: attendance, punctuality, game-based applications, board games, knowledge tournament, video classes, and group tasks to increase student motivation and achievement. All of the gaming elements guaranteed points to students in a leaderboard. At the end of the semester, a reward system compensated students with additional scores to their final average, badges, and gifts. Finally, the students evaluated the gamification, and the results obtained were quite positive.
Shooting games underwent several transformations throughout their long history. However, the use of light guns in shooting games has not experienced significant development in the last decade. This article proposes a laser capture solution to achieve a new interaction with regular point and click shooting games. For that, we developed an intermediate solution that can adapt gameplay with no need to modify the original games. We used four different games to evaluate the proposed solution: two titles explicitly developed to test the model, and two commercially published third-party games. We tried different weapons (toys, airsoft, 3D printed etc.), and sowed that the obtained results were very satisfactory. No loss of performance was observed in the games - all the tested games ran stably at 60 FPS. Moreover, the players did not notice any lag between the gun shot and the corresponding mouse click performed by the system.