Em busca do Césio-137: uma proposta lúdica para o ensino de radioativade

Abstract

Chemistry is one of the subjects that make up the students' curriculum and plays a fundamental role in enabling the individual to understand the phenomena that exist in their daily lives. However, it is one of the subjects that presents the greatest difficulty, mainly due to the need for abstraction, especially in the teaching of radioactivity, leading to a lack of interest and demotivation among students, as they are unable to attribute a relationship between the contents and their reality in the world. Therefore, there is a need to add, in the teaching and learning process, new methodologies that favor the student's recovery and interest in learning Chemistry. The use of games has proven to be a great pedagogical resource to minimize such difficulties, as they make it possible to work on any content in a pleasurable way, based on leisure and fun. Thus, with the aim of bringing Chemistry closer to students, we developed and validated a didactic board game of the Agon/Alea type, called “In search of Césium-137”, which presents as a context the radioactive accident in Goiânia/GO, for application in a 3rd year high school class, in order to immerse the student in a scenario rich in information, based on the famous local accident, so that we could evaluate the potential of the game in the process of teaching and learning radioactivity content, from validation following the criteria structured by Nowak and Souza. After application, in validation, we realized that the game proved to be efficient, as students actively participated in the entire process, demonstrating enthusiasm and cooperative attitude, in addition to meeting the criteria of Interaction between players, Dimension of learning, Gameplay, Space and time limitation , Application, Challenge and Creativity. Furthermore, our results converge with the observations found in the literature, corroborating the ability of games to improve content enjoyment. Furthermore, the proposed material managed to fulfill its role, both in the playful and educational dimensions, promoting moments of relaxation, interaction and effective learning of the specific content.