Special Sessions

Analytics is an area of growing interest in the research communities. INFORMS defined analytics as the scientific process of transforming data into insights with the purpose of making better decisions. Being grounded on the area of decision support systems, the area of analytics has got a vast range of applications. One important application concerns educational environments, where the three types of analytics, namely, descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive are being applied.

The use of LMS where the activity of the students’ can be easily accessed, potentiated the use of analytics to understand their route during the learning process, thus they can be helped to improve during that process. Also, the use of analytics from the school’s managers, can help them to take better decisions. In this special session we are interested in research papers focusing in two of the three domains, as presented by Cetis Analytics Series: domain of the teacher and learner, and domain of management and support systems

The Special Session in Gamification on Computer Programming Learning (GonCPL) aims to bring researchers and practitioners working in innovative approaches using gamification in the learning process.

On the last years, gamification has studied in various contexts, such as marketing, health, sports and education. According to literature, gamification integrates "elements of game design in non-game context", with the objective of increasing users’ engagement in certain activities.

Gamification are attracting a growing interest among the main actors that take part in the learning-teaching process and are highly considered among other educational approaches.

Some authors indicate that gamification may play an important role in the learning process, by the ability of overcoming difficulties of some topics and by motivating and engagement students in subjects that are considered less interesting, but that are undeniable important.

Gamification in education has received enormous attention in these last years, both of researchers and educators. However, the knowledge about the effect of gamification on students’ performance is still scarce. On the other hand, the gamification integration on educational information systems should follow a formal and clear design process, however these gamification design processes for specific contexts are not still defined.