Developing a digital game with high-ability/gifted students in a low-income public school: A Brazilian experience

Abstract

This paper is about a digital game educational project developed with a group of high-ability/gifted students of the Room-Pole for Inclusion and Resources - High-ability and Giftedness (RPIR-HA/G). This Pole is located in a low-income district in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The project was one of the actions performed by the Extension Program Ludopoetics, which is, in turn, under the Sequential Graphic Arts on Media Culture for Children and Young: Education, Production, and Reading Research. I coordinate both as a teacher at the Visual Arts Department of Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. The project was developed in 2019 and counted with a team composed of three undergraduate students. The Coordinator of the Pole, Aline Russo, has also supported this project; The Room-Pole IR-HA/G shelters about 25 students, most of them teenagers from 11 to 17 years old, coming from eighteen municipal public schools of the district. The project team planned and ministered a series of workshops about game creation from the basics: conception and design, art, animation, and computer programming. We applied a ludic methodology in order to engage the participants, and only open-source apps were used during the activities. Finally, the group of high-ability/gifted (HA/G) students were divided into two teams and developed two game projects. Our main objectives were to approach games as a serious subject of education and art education; to develop methodologies in art education using games as a strategy and as a result at the same time; and finally, to teach the high-ability/gifted students what is a game, how to do it and what are the required skills to make it. To support our proposals, we took Johann Huizinga, Ian Bogost, Scott Rogers, among other authors.