Newsgames e aprendizagem: possibilidades de construção de conhecimento a partir da interação com jogos digitais

Abstract

Based on historic-cultural perspective, this research intent to comprehend the meanings constructed by the players from the interaction with the newsgames, seeking to identify the learnings, conceptual trainings and the knowledge constructions. Newsgames are digital games whose stories are based on facts or news events, generally produced by media enterprises or independent developers. For companies, the format ha been constituted as a multimedia platform involving journalism and entertainment to attract young readers, but, from another perspective, it can be interpreted as a signic space of framing opinion, considering that the arguments are presented as a digital narrative in an simulation environment, exploring the procedural rhetoric of the digital games. I see the newsgames as symbolic instruments that enable a bigger involvement of the players with the world knowledge behind the news, being able to contribute in a more effective way to the citizenship formation and to the learning. As I intend to work at the interface of communication and education, I have invited to participate in the field work graduation students of journalism and history, because the majority of the chosen newsgames are dealing with thematics that include the field of history, as the Farroupilha Insurrection, the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. My intention was to identify how the students of these two areas could interact with themselves and to enrich the dialogic discussion with their views of communicators and teachers in training, thinking in the methods of production and of signification of the games, as well as in the possibilities of the pedagogic usage of them. By questioning which type of knowledge could be constructed by the interaction of the subjects with the newsgames and between themselves, I have found in Vigotsky (2009) arguments to comprehend the spontaneous concepts (which refer to the most elementary concepts that are related to the day to day life) and the scientific concepts (that are developed with the higher mental functions, such as the language, memory, attention, sensation, perception, emotion and feeling). Of the results, I highlight that you can always learn something from games, but that learning from the interaction with the newsgames, as well as with other kinds of digital games, can be enhanced with the post-game dialogic discussion. If in these discussions the players are instigated to reflect for themselves about the possible learnings, searching the indexes of memory and the personal interactions to build and to share knowledge through dialogic interchanges, you can still go beyond the daily knowledge construction, also developing the buildings conceptual, abstractions and generalizations own scientific knowledge.