Abstract

In recent years, the computational thinking has been established as a formative priority from primary school onwards, both internationally and nationally level, which has led to initiatives of recreational strategies and curricular integration. The initial training processes in programming are mainly focused on workshops about teaching methodologies, therefore, the assessment instruments are artifacts that measure the quality of the solution elaborated by the teacher, relegating the evaluation of the process due to the difficulty to obtain elements that allow the characterization. Thus, this article characterizes through analytics and statistical tests the process of solving computer problems by primary school students based on the effort involved in each challenge. Hence, experimental tests were conducted with a group of K-12 students, who solved a series of drills using a block-based tool, both gamified and nongamified with the purpose of corroborating that gamification generates higher levels of global effort. In the end, the results show that a group of students exhibits a higher level of engagement and effectiveness in the gamified version while in the non-gamified version they are more reflective. Not only do these results provide crucial information for the creation of assessment instruments of the computer solving problems process, but also provide to the behavioral differences in gamified environments.