Cidadania digital crítica no ensino médio técnico: desenvolvimento de um jogo educativo digital para formação ética e tecnológica

Abstract

This monograph investigates how the development and application of a digital educational game, grounded in gamification principles, can contribute to the development of critical digital competencies related to digital citizenship among technical high school students. The research, of mixed-methods approach and exploratory quasi-experimental within-group design, involved the development of the game Agência Digital, a web application structured around problem-situations organized into the dimensions of digital security, privacy and data protection, ethical behavior on social media, and critical analysis of digital information. The intervention was applied in a state public school, across three first-year classes, following a protocol of pre-test, game session, and post-test, with complementary collection of automated interaction records and participants’ perceptions. Of the 58 students who began participation, 48 completed the full path and composed the analytical sample. The percentage of correct answers in the knowledge block rose from 77.1% to 80.7%, a variation limited by a marked ceiling effect, since 20 of the 48 participants already answered all items correctly in the pre-test, with only the digital security item showing a statistically significant change. Perceived self-efficacy rose from 3.47 to 3.62 on a five-point scale and declared satisfaction reached a mean of 4.30. Interaction records indicated 63.7% optimal first-attempt choices and 72.9% adherence to the optional transfer stage. Analysis of open reflections revealed that students identify the economic logic of disinformation but are unaware of the one sustaining the exploitation of their own data. It is concluded that gamification, when guided by clear pedagogical intentionality, constitutes a relevant strategy for ethical, critical, and responsible education in the use of digital technologies, with the caveat that the adopted design, lacking a control group, does not allow causal attribution of the observed results.