DESENVOLVIMENTO DE UMA METODOLOGIA EDUCACIONAL PARA A CRIAÇÃO DE KITS GAMIFICADOS ESCALONÁVEIS: UM ESTUDO DE CASO EM EXTENSÃO UNIVERSITÁRIA NA ENGENHARIA ELÉTRICA.

Abstract

: The underrepresentation of women in Electrical Engineering reflects a persistent structural cycle: in Brazil, women account for only 20.2% of registered engineering professionals, a proportion reproduced among undergraduate students, as data from the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) confirm. University outreach is widely recognized as an effective strategy for disrupting this cycle; however, its operationalization faces three concrete barriers identified through semi-structured interviews with UFF faculty: academic overload, difficulty in the didactic transposition of complex technical content, and the limited engagement of young audiences with expository methodologies. To address these barriers simultaneously, the EmPowerElas project developed a four-phase iterative methodological framework for the creation of scalable educational kits, grounded in Project-Based Learning (PBL) and gamification. The first phase maps the curriculum and defines, prior to any design decision, four content abstraction levels (playful, visual-practical, technical, and investigative), ensuring that a single physical kit remains pedagogically functional from elementary school to postgraduate level; scalability is therefore a structural decision built into the framework from the outset, not a posterior adaptation. The second phase combines expert interviews with a pedagogical literature review, organizing findings into three barrier clusters, each of which directly generates a design principle and formally establishes PBL as the pedagogical anchor of the outreach workshops. The third phase translates these principles into a physical prototype, producing four distinct card sets sharing the same physical support. A fourth validation phase, involving structured feedback from each educational level, is planned as future work to close the iterative cycle. As a case study of the framework, the EmPowerCards was developed: a scalable card game for content review in Electrical Engineering based on a progressive hint system, whose scalability operates exclusively through deck replacement, with rules remaining identical across all audiences while language and technical complexity are calibrated per level, making the outreach activity operationally viable without requiring prior pedagogical expertise from faculty.