Keywords

1 Introduction

One factor that stands out in the information age is the emergence of a new generation of young people, called by Machado and Matsuura (2018) of the “all at the same time now” generation, which has access to much information immediately and instantaneously.

Within the university it is possible to perceive the reflexes of this new generation. Reading lengthy documents, such as regiments, statutes and manuals, is no longer a practice of most students, since they are used to receive information in a more succinct and dynamic way and have difficulty waiting and concentrating. This brings a lot of misinformation, often harming the academic, which fails to meet deadlines or unaware of their duties and even their rights in the educational institution.

Students use institutional information for the development of their activities, such as class schedule, support scholarship announcements, student assistance, legislation, among others. The problem is that institutional websites provide a large amount of information from various interest groups. Thus, most students do not feel motivated to seek such information, mainly because of the difficulty in finding it, due to the diversity and quantity of information available.

This new generation is also visibly more interested in games than previous generations, which has an impact on education and how they interact with other people (Da Silva et al. 2014). The concept of gamification can be a motivational factor for this scenario. The use of game strategies and bonus application for reading important documents can increase the knowledge of this generation of university students. Nguyen et al. (2018) report that’s “gamification has increasingly become a hot topic over the past few years”.

The gamification is the application of game elements in different environments and activities not related to games to motivate and engage users. The act of playing brings benefits such as pleasure, development of thinking and cognition skills, and stimulation of attention and memory (Da Silva et al. 2014).

Thus, considering the difficulty of accessing information on institutional websites, the great interest in games and the increasing use of mobile devices, this research proposes an application that offers relevant information to students in a more simplified and dynamic way, using the resources of gamification.

In order to achieve the objectives of this research, the following methodological steps were necessary: (i) Study on gamification, its characteristics and forms of application; (ii) Diagnosis together university students the information that is most useful to their academic life; (iii) Application prototype development for mobile devices; (iv) Validation of the prototype through its application to the target audience.

2 Gamification

The Gamification is the application of game elements in various environments and non-game related activities to motivate and engage users. The act of playing brings benefits such as pleasure, development of thinking skills and cognition, and stimulation of attention and memory (Da Silva et al. 2014).

The term gamification means the application of elements used in the creation of electronic games, such as mechanics and dynamics (Borges et al. 2013). The mechanisms that can be found in games have an important role to motivate and engage their players. Engagement is defined by the “time period in which the individual has a large amount of connections to another person or environment.”

It can be said that the level of engagement is influenced by the person’s dedication to assigned tasks and that is the main aspect for the success of gamification. In terms of motivation it is necessary to highlight two types:

  • Intrinsic motivation: it comes from within the person and is not based on the external world. The player engages of his own volition because the activities arouse interest and pleasure.

  • Extrinsic motivation: it comes from the external world and has as its starting point the desire to obtain an external reward, such as material goods.

According to Fadel et al. (2014) the challenge of creating a gamification environment is to stimulate the two types of motivation and to maintain the motivation of the users it is necessary to provide incentives of high quality and in different formats. To strengthen individuals’ motivation, the environment/activity must have clear objectives, feedback and guidance, rewards, among others.

Some of the game mechanics that were used in the application to motivate students to acquire needed knowledge through edicts, documents, and regiments are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Some mechanics of gamification.
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The main focus of gamification is to involve the user emotionally with the tasks performed by him. For this, it is possible to use several game mechanics that are perceived by the participants as elements that bring pleasure and challenge, favoring the creation of an environment conducive to engagement. The mechanics of a game system consists of several tools that have the ability to produce significant aesthetic responses to the players (Fadel et al. 2014).

The gamification therefore can be applied not only in the learning process, but also in activities that involve the seeking of information and activities that encourage the individual’s behavior.

3 Access to Information by University Students

The Higher Education Institutions (IES), with the purpose of dynamizing and expanding their actions, have been active in the areas of teaching, research and extension, which demands integrated information systems and easy usability for access to large amount of content available.

The IES, for Maccari and Rodrigues (2003), while “having in knowledge its main product, has its processes compartmentalized in specialized blocks of knowledge, usually limited by its structure”, which hinders access to information.

For Bianchi et al. (2010), numerous Information Technologies have been used to support the sharing of information and knowledge, such as: internet, intranet, extranet, moodle, workflow, groupware, electronic document management, knowledge maps, data mining, data warehousing, among others.

In the HEIs, institutional websites have been the main way to disseminate and share information. However, in institutional sites, university students often find it difficult to find information that is relevant to them, because they add a large amount of content, seeking to meet the diverse interests of teachers, undergraduate and graduate students, university agents and the external community.

Each student faces his university entrance in a different way, but there is a common challenge for all, which is to understand the functioning of an HEI, with all its duties and rights. The academicals should adapt to a series of routines and activities, turning their efforts to meet the norms and demands of the higher course. There are so many obligations with deadlines and fees to pay, such as rematch, second call for evidence, request of documents, among others.

The university is also a space of opportunities that go beyond the classroom, encompassing academic activities as well as monitoring, extracurricular activities, scientific initiation, extension actions and cultural and leisure activities. In order for the student to develop in its fullness, it is necessary to have access to opportunities for participation in projects that the institution and the course offer, whether voluntary projects or with scholarship assistance and also to the pedagogical project of the course, always with fast, dynamic and real-time access.

Fenerick (2017) states that “integration between people and the intensive technologies of using information and communication technologies (ICTs), represented by the transformations caused in social relations by the use of smartphone.” A survey released by CanalTechFootnote 1 shows the high rate of access to the internet by Brazilian university students through cell phones, corresponding to approximately 95%, which indicates that only 5% of students do not have a smartphone. Given this scenario, organizations have increasingly made available applications to disseminate information with greater convenience and speed, meeting the needs of this new generation always connected via mobile phones.

Diagnosis together university students the information that is most useful to their academic life.

Aiming to identify the difficulties presented in the access to information and which information present in the institutional site are of greater importance to the academics, a research was carried out with the students of different courses and graduation periods of the State University of Norte do Paraná (UENP) - Campus Luiz Meneghel (CLM).

A questionnaire containing 19 questions regarding access to the contents of the website, difficulty of access and suggestions of contents important for students to be made available. 220 students participated in the study, with the highest participation being students of first years of formation, totaling 73.1 students in the 1st and 2nd years, 24.2 students in other years (3rd, 4th and 5th) and 2.7 did not report the graduation period.

The vast majority of participants reported a significant level of difficulty in finding relevant content and information. 23.6% of the students who demonstrated difficulty 5, on a scale between 1 and 10, were enrolled in the first years of the courses, which may mean that at the beginning of the graduation, when they do not have so much access to the various resources, students already find the difficulty.

The results higher than 5, for the degree of difficulty, were pointed out by the students of all the years and courses so it can not be affirmed that the course or time of study improves or worsens the difficulty of access.

One of the reasons most pointed to the difficulty of finding information was the organization of the information (59.5% of the answers). It is also important to note that a large number of participants pointed to the large amount of information on the institutional website and that search engines are not efficient. With this you can understand that students can not find what they need easily.

As already mentioned, the institutional website connects all the information about the institution and not only those of interest to the academics, which may be one of reasons for this result.

From the results it is possible to assume that students enrolled have little knowledge of the Regiment. Those who read the regiment mentioned that it was the first year, the vast majority. This may mean that when entering to university, students seek to learn about academic norms, but over time they will fail to access this information, which may change occasionally.

The main way of obtaining information pointed out by academics is “the institutional website” (40.5) followed by “for guidance from other students” (36.8%). Thus, students obtain information about enrollment, transfer, curriculum and approval system, mainly through the institution’s website, other students, course teachers, academic secretary, among others.

An important point also in the research is that students have more interest to the events and college news, followed by information on the entrance exam, the academic calendar and notices and documents related to graduation.

On extension and culture, most do not access this information, the ones that access, usually look for event certificates. Information about Distance Education, Internationalization and Publications are poorly accessed by students, perhaps because of the lack of knowledge and applicability of these subjects.

Another point of prominence in the research demonstrates the priorities of interest of the students on the information that should be available in the institutional website, which are, respectively, from the highest priority to the lowest priority: notes of the lessons; class schedule; schedule of availability of teachers; and frequency in lessons.

On this subject, scholars also pointed out that most of these contents are not available on the institutional website, such as class schedule, which are always fixed on physical panels somewhere in the university, which makes it difficult to access from home, for example.

On investigation about Gamification, most students (81.8%) do not know the concept and those who know it are usually matriculate in technological courses. After guidance on the concept and application of gamification, students also indicated some rewards they would like to receive, which are, respectively, the highest priority to lowest: partial grades in subjects; discounts in the cafeteria; discount on events; various awards; discounts on Xerox; others.

4 Application Prototype Development for Mobile Devices

From the research carried out, an application was developed to assist students in undergraduate courses in the field of information relevant to their academic development. Some mechanics of the gamification were used in the development of the application in order to promote the motivation for access to information and academic interaction.

4.1 Application Development

The application prototype was developed with the support of the PhoneGap framework. This framework makes it possible to use HyperText Markup Language (HTML), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and Javascript interpreted programming language to send and receive requests to a system developed with the programming language of PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor).

In order to store the application data, we used an open source relational database manager, MySQL (Structured Query Language). In this version, the application is available for mobile devices using the Android operating system.

In addition to PhoneGap, other open source frameworks and libraries were used to develop the application and PHP system, all based on the languages mentioned above, in order to achieve faster and more secure development. For the stylization of the application, in addition to the pure CSS, the Bootstrap framework in its version 3.3.7 was used, since it contemplates styles and components ready for use, friendly and responsive. To control the actions in the application, some functions of the jQuery library in version 3.3.1 were used, together with pure JavaScript, as Document Object Model (DOM) manipulations and Asynchronous JavaScript And XML (AJAX) requests for the PHP system.

The PHP system is being built to function as an API (Application Programming Interface), so it is possible to use other interfaces integrated in the system in the future, without having to re-code the back-end routines. For the development of the API, the Laravel framework in version 5.7, based on PHP is being used as it offers an architecture in MVC (Model View Controller) has routines prepared to function as an API in addition to following the design pattern ORM (Object-relational mapping), which makes it easier to work with relational database data.

4.2 Application Features

Students are currently not used to reading documents and edicts with numerous pages and information. Thus, considering these difficulties, the application relies on the provision of excerpts that refer to the essential academic norms to the life of the academic. The gamification feature has been applied in accessing these standards in order to stimulate their use. The main screen has the contents of greater access or greater interest of the students, as verified in the diagnosis made. In Fig. 1 (left side), you can see the application’s functionalities, which are: News, Events, Academic Calendar, Schedules, Certificates, Edits and Documents, Score, Moodle, Regiment and Contacts.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

The main screen and screen of regiment

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The application development involved in this first stage the creation of a functional prototype of the final application and, to facilitate the development, some sections of the institutional website of the university were used. The Events, Certificates and Documents buttons have been programmed to redirect the user to the university’s institutional website. One of the advantages in this redirection is that by the institutional website the student has to go a long way to arrive at this information, and by the application the access is direct.

Schedules and score content is not available on the institutional website, but has been chosen by students as more important to be made available in the application. The news button, remembering that the institutional website is accessed not only by students, but also by teachers, employees and external community, redirects to news tab, bringing only those that are of interest to the students. The Academic Calendar and class schedules are usually made available in PDF format, so it was made available in image form, making access simpler, avoiding having to download it again and again.

Students’ scores are usually physically available; in the application they may be presented in the form of images, separated into folders by course and period, to facilitate student access. Moodle button redirects the user to the Moodle page that is widely used for monitoring of some lessons.

The concept of gamification has been applied in the content called Academic Procedures, in which we can find all the necessary information concerning the registration, enrollment renewals, second call of the tests, transfer, among others. In order to access these contents the user must log in to the application (if the student is not registered yet, it is necessary to do it first), then you can access the content of interest, participate in the quiz with questions related to the content read, observe the progress of the other players and compete with them.

Thus, the user can access the academic norms, choosing the topic of their interest, as shown in Fig. 1 (right side). The user will be directed to the passages of the academic regiment referring to the chosen theme (approval system, transfer, second call of exams, among others), as shown in Fig. 2 (left side). When it is necessary to obtain further information he will always have the option of reading the entire regiment.

Fig. 2.
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Screen of a part of academic regiment and screen of a question.

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After reading the selected theme, the application user can access the questions related to the text read (Fig. 2 – right side). On this screen the user can see, besides the questions regarding the read section, your current score and may also be directed to the full regiment. Feedback on hit happens immediately after the answer. In the case of the correct answer, the marking turns green and the user earns points in his score.

The rewards according to the score can be given in different ways (partial grades in subjects; discounts in the cafeteria, discounts on events, among others), as suggested by academics in the diagnosis performed. Rewards have not yet been treated in the app in this first release.

The idea of the application of gamification is to use the game of thought and the mechanics of games to motivate students to know the academic norms of the institution and to create a culture of reading these documents. Gamification does not imply creating a game that addresses the real world problem in the virtual world, but rather uses the same strategies, methods and thoughts to solve problems in the real world.

5 Final Considerations

The university students needs to be informed on a daily basis about academic issues and also to have access to the opportunities that can contribute to its development. To do this, you need to have access to this information facilitated. Institutional websites make it difficult for students to quickly access content that is of interest to them, usually because of the large amount of information they add. Like this, in order to investigate the most interesting contents of the students, a questionnaire containing questions related to university contents was applied a 220 students.

The investigation allowed to verify that the students have a high level of difficulty to access the contents of their interest, pointing out as main reason the organization and the great amount of information available. The most interesting contents of the students were their scores, class schedule and the availability of the teachers.

The application prototype was developed for Android operating system, containing only the most interesting subjects pointed out by the students, such as, News, Events, Certificates, Documents and the Environment of Distance Learning (Moodle). All these subjects usually have a long way to their access, due to the structuring of the university website and the large amount of information already mentioned.

Another point worth mentioning is that most of the students do not have any or have little knowledge about the rules and academic procedures of the UENP that are included in its Regiment. In this way, the application presents the contents of fundamental interest of them. To engage the student and motivate access to these contents, the gamification technique was applied and some mechanics were used to motivate the users: Scoring, Levels, Ranking, Rewards and Feedback.

The next step of this research is the verification of the applicability of the “Student-Guide” application together with a group of students of the different courses and areas of knowledge. There are so many tasks that a student must deal with within the university that it becomes almost impossible to deal with all at once. Thus, the application is expected to facilitate and, through the use of gamification, bring greater motivation for access to academic information.