Os jogos digitais na educação escolar: investigação sobre seus usos segundo os docentes do Ensino fundamental em São Paulo

Abstract

The growth of the digital games industry and its commercial success have led to the potential use of this technology in areas other than entertainment. Currently, there is a large production of digital games aimed at education, the purpose of which is to teach certain school content and develop specific skills. In this sense, the aim of this research was to investigate how digital games are used by elementary school teachers (1st to 9th grade) in their teaching practices in order to understand whether the use of this technology has favored critical education or expressed its instrumental nature. To this end, questionnaires were administered to elementary school teachers in the state of São Paulo who use this technology as a teaching resource. The teachers are from both the public and private sectors, as well as from different grades and subjects at this stage of education. The questions asked sought to understand the circumstances in which games are used by teachers and the effect of this use on students' education. With the data obtained, a comparative analysis was carried out among the responding educators, as well as the comparison of data on the performance of teachers with the proposals conceived by the developers of the digital games used by these professionals. These stages adopted as reference the Critical Theory of society, especially the texts of Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and Marcuse. The discussions had as principle the duality of technology in society, both in its potential for domination and also for liberation. The results indicated, in general, that the use of digital games in school education is encouraged by an idea of modernization of teaching practices and that this resource reinforces participation and stimulates students ' interest in pedagogical activities. Along with this, it was analyzed that the demands of the labor market directly corroborate the use of this technology in educational curricula, school proposals and teaching practices. In the end, as much as digital games may have a diversity of content and teachers who apply other resources with the games, there is still a limitation in the way teaching occurs in the classroom. The determinations imposed by the very rationality of digital media configures learning to models determined by the very logic present in the media