CuriosaMente: estudo de viabilidade de intervenções baseadas em jogos para a aprendizagem matemática na educação infantil

Abstract

Difficulties in mathematical learning affect approximately 5% to 7% of the world's population, which can generate significant impacts throughout life. Children who face such challenges tend to have globally inferior academic performance, in addition to greater vulnerability to adverse social and emotional consequences. The scientific literature points out that interventions carried out in the initial stages of development can be crucial to mitigating these difficulties. Such actions favor the improvement of school performance and promote lasting benefits, such as increased social inclusion and reduced risk of negative outcomes, including school dropout and criminality in adult life. Faced with this scenario, it is relevant to implement pedagogical practices informed by evidence for the development of mathematical cognition in basic education, including early childhood education. The present study is a feasibility investigation, whose objective is to evaluate the perception of teachers about the CuriosaMente program, seeking to examine the acceptability, applicability, engagement, and potential challenges of implementing the intervention in a real educational context, producing subsidies for future larger-scale studies. The CuriosaMente program includes game-based interventions aimed at improving mathematical and socio-emotional skills. The present study will evaluate the program's pedagogical practices focused on the development of mathematical skills. For this, two specific games were used: Sete Mares and Geomundo, discovering the world of shapes. Both games were developed based on epistemological and empirical foundations of developmental psychology and education. The study included the participation of nine Early Childhood Education teachers, who implemented the program focused on the development of mathematical cognition. The program worked on sub-domains such as decimal number system, addition, and subtraction, in addition to geometric shapes and visual discrimination. For this, it stimulated logical-mathematical, quantitative, and spatial reasoning through cognitive strategies such as counting, mental calculation, and classification. The sample of 185 children, aged between 5 and 6, had a mean age of 5.78 years (SD=0.33). Data collection was carried out by analyzing field diary records produced by the teachers during the program's application. The analysis of this material, conducted at the end of the intervention, was guided by axes such as acceptability, the perception of changes (cognitive, behavioral, and engagement), and the challenges and benefits associated with the implementation of the proposal in the school context. 12 The results indicate that the teachers considered the game a viable and potentially effective tool for the development of mathematical skills, highlighting the increase in children's interest and participation during activities, as well as gains in aspects such as attention, mathematical language, and group cooperation. The implementation of the intervention with pedagogical games proved to be viable and well-accepted in the school context, as indicated by the quantitative and qualitative reports. The study showed that the games promoted engagement and cooperation among the children, in addition to stimulating the use of autonomous problemsolving strategies. These findings reinforce the importance of playful methodologies in education and can support future educational policies.