Proposal for a mobile application with Gamification for Learning Discrete Structures. Case study: University of Guayaquil, Ecuador

Abstract

The objective of the project was the development of a prototype of a mobile application that allows learning through Gamification for students of the Software Career of the University of Guayaquil, who are taking the subject of Discrete Structures. The methodology used was exploratory research, where documents such as scientific articles from indexed journals were reviewed; descriptive research was applied to describe the flow of learning processes, before and after with the proposal of the mobile application. An interview was conducted with the teacher who teaches the subject and a feasibility survey was conducted with the students to know their degree of acceptance of the development of the mobile prototype. For software development, the Cascade Methodology was followed to identify the requirements, analysis, design, implementation and testing of the application. As a result, a mobile prototype was achieved in a first phase with 8 modules: 1) Account creation, 2) Login, 3) Home, 4) Profile, 5) Content, 6) Rating, 7) Achievements and 8) Forum. As for Gamification, it consisted of the student answering a questionnaire for each level of content of the unit, giving him a score for each question, this allows him to be in a ranking position with the best scores among all the students of all the parallels of that teaching period. As a conclusion, it can be established that the App will serve as a support tool for the students' learning, besides that the App will allow a competition among them about the knowledge acquired, obtaining a scale of achievements reached and thus obtaining a rating position. Another virtue of the application is a forum space as a means of exchanging queries on a particular subject; in a next phase it is planned to conduct a more in-depth study on Gamification techniques to include them in the App.