Aplicación educativa gamificada como soporte pedagógico en la asignatura de estudios sociales para noveno año de educación básica

Abstract

The present research work was carried out in the Juan XXIII Private Educational Unit, located in the city of Huaquillas, in the province of El Oro, Juan Nuñez Puertas between Sucre and Portoviejo streets, with the participation and collaboration of the Social Studies teacher, José Ochoa, and with the support of his students in the ninth year of EGB parallel "A". Due to the health emergency in COVID-19, the educational institutions have been forced to close their doors, thus changing the face-to-face modality to online. For this, it is intended that teachers can have the knowledge that applying new strategies brings their students closer by showing innovative tools which are employed academically according to the needs of their students thus making the use of mobile educational applications as a pedagogical support for their subject and there is feedback on relevant topics. However, it is of utmost importance that students are involved in all areas in order to develop new skills and knowledge to prepare them for a future where they master Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This not too distant future needs teachers who are trained to face the various changes experienced by educational institutions. Thus, teachers must include technology as a pedagogical support to their teaching-learning process. Starting from our main research objective is to design a mobile educational application, which allows feedback on the contents of the subject of Social Studies, this according to relevant topics given by the teacher according to the Didactic Unit Plan (PUD) in order to improve their learning in ninth grade students through summary of content made in presentations and infographics in Canva, as well as the tests made in App Inventor and the activities performed in EducaPlay. For this, the qualitative approach was carried out in a post-test to a defined population of 44 students of the ninth year of EGB and the teacher of the subject of Social Studies. The MADAMDM methodology was used to develop our prototype, since it presents its phases and characteristics according to the process we have developed for the construction of our tool, allowing us to satisfactorily meet the expectations necessary to adapt our resource. According to the experimentations carried out and data collection, it was possible to know that our implemented prototype obtained positive results, where the students were participative since, according to their comments, they personally prefer the constant use of mobile applications in their free time to give feedback on the contents of the contents, thus fulfilling the proposed objectives of the research. Finally, the research presented favorable results, where the effectiveness of the implementation of the prototype is evidenced both the teacher of the subject of Social Studies and their students of the Ninth Year of EGB, as well as in its due process for improvement there were recommendations which helped to improve in the design of our implemented resource KATEST. On the other hand, the mobile educational application was developed through a software development environment such as App Inventor and it was named KATEST taking as reference the letter "K" for our initials of authors, "A" for application and "TEST" for the functionality of the application by having evaluation test by subject so that the student can simultaneously feedback the contents.