Jorge Simões

The combined adoption of Agile and DevOps enables organizations to cope with the increasing complexity of managing customer requirements and requests. It fosters the emergence of a more collaborative and Agile framework to replace the waterfall models applied to software development flow and the separation of development teams from operations. This study aims to explore the benefits of the combined adoption of both models. A qualitative methodology is adopted by including twelve case studies from international software engineering companies. Thematic analysis is employed in identifying the benefits of the combined adoption of both paradigms. The findings reveal the existence of twelve benefits, highlighting the automation of processes, improved communication between teams, and reduction in time to market through process integration and shorter software delivery cycles. Although they address different goals and challenges, the Agile and DevOps paradigms when properly combined and ali...

The purpose of this chapter is to identify and analyze the main organizational and technological factors that play a relevant role in a transformational strategic change inherent in changing the business model supported on the internet. An analysis was made of the different business models, as well as their connection to strategic management and how this is accomplished in the organizational and technological plan. This empirical study, based on the qualitative methodology, focuses on a single case study on a Portuguese company that recently changed its business model. The findings allowed the authors to assess the advantages and challenges posed by the transformation of an initial business based on a website that performs a comparison of prices for an integrated model based on a marketplace, in which customers can make their purchases and access all products, from different stores, in one place.

Covid19 pandemic has stimulated both the discussion on the use of IT related teaching tools and the exposure of the student population to vulnerabilities linked to cybersecurity literacy. The study presented is based on the assumption that the use of gamification as an element or tool that promotes learning within digital environments may be feasible, and more specifically may function as a teaching element on issues related to cybersecurity for students, especially for higher education students. In order to quantify the openness of students to such a tool path, quantitative methodology was used, and a survey was carried out in two Polytechnic Institutions (PI), achieving a sample of 95 students, and seeking perceptions on positive impacts resulting from the creation of a game scenario for better learning. The statistical analysis conducted tested hypotheses regarding representations and practices about gamification and cybersecurity. Results show that students, regardless of their ...

One of the main strategies for fostering the entrepreneurial mindset in students has been the development of training activities inside and outside classrooms using serious games. The chapter makes a brief description regarding five serious games initiatives that intend to promote and facilitate entrepreneurship education for different educational stages. Furthermore, the authors discuss the key benefits and challenges by the introduction of serious games in the learning process. The authors concluded by identifying that serious games have the potentiality of improving the learning process by providing an immersive experience for students that increases their motivation and potentiates the acquisition of multidisciplinary competencies. However, there are some challenges that should be properly considered and mitigated, namely in terms of assessing learning goals, integration with didactical systems, and support for different styles of learning.

This paper describes a controlled experiment were flow, as a psychological state, was used as a measurement of engagement with a Social Learning Environment (SLE) in a primary education context. Flow was measured by using a questionnaire based on the Dispositional Flow Scale-2 (DFS- 2). The DFS-2 assesses the general tendency to experience flow within a particular setting. The experiment tested the hypothesis that a gamified version of a SLE causes a more user engagement than a non-gamified version. A gamification framework described in this paper inspired the gamified version of the SLE. The paper presents a description of the experiment followed by an explanation of how the experiment was run, how the gamification framework was applied and how the results were processed. The paper ends with a discussion of the experiment’s results and offers interpretations and conclusions based on those results.

Several companies in the information technology field are progressively adopting Agile methodologies. This change necessarily transforms the management paradigm and poses new challenges to the leadership process. In this sense, this study seeks to explore the challenges perceived by leaders and perceive the competencies they should have to manage projects and teams in an Agile environment. The study used a survey to obtain data from 387 professionals in the information technology sector. The findings reveal the most important skills include the ability to have people skills, team management competencies, provide feedback on employee performance, and have problem-solving skills. Additionally, this study reveals people's management dimension is key to increasing productivity in Agile environments, and furthermore, respondents' years of experience proved to be discriminating in perceiving the importance of these skills. The outcomes of this study are relevant for companies that...

Entrepreneurship serious games offer an innovative model for developing entrepreneurial skills with students. Furthermore, they provide a highly engaging and risk-free environment for students to become aware of the challenges posed in the early stages of building and developing a start-up. In this sense, it becomes relevant to explore the process of adopting this type of game in the classroom. This study aims to explore how the formative and summative components of an assessment are mapped into seven serious entrepreneurship games. Through this information, this study seeks to help instructors in the process of adopting a serious game and understanding how the evaluation of these games can be used in the context of an entrepreneurship course.

This thesis addresses the problem of students’ disengagement by investigating if gami- fication can make a contribution to solve the problem and how. Gamification is a new trend that aims to improve people’s engagement, motivation, loyalty or participation. It started as a marketing tool but widespread to several different areas where peoples’ involvement is a key issue. Gamification is inspired by the success and popularity of video games and looks for ways to use game’s features in non-game contexts, as a way to drive game-like engagement.
While schools are struggling with the lack of motivation and engagement of many of their students, technology is part of most children and teenagers lives in today’s societies. They are heavy users of several media that, through mobile and wireless technologies, are almost permanently present and available everywhere. Schools have to compete for students’ attention and time and find the ways to use technology in their favour and fill the gap between school and the outside technological world. Also, most of today’s students are video game’s consumers. Games have been used in educational and training scenarios for a long time. But building full-fledged games with learning purposes has high implementations costs.
Gamification is a way to take advantage of the games’ power with lesser costs and ef- fort. An initial research on gamification revealed that education was precisely one of the main fields that could benefit from this new trend. As a main goal, the thesis proposes a framework to help teachers using technology-enhanced learning environments powered with gamification. It is expected that these environments can improve students’ behav- iors towards school and learning. The framework also defines what should be the high level architecture of gamified digital systems. This architecture is platform independent and is proposed as a way to help developers in the implementation of gamified systems, by highlighting what their main building blocks should be. Based on a broad literature review, this thesis presents the most used game elements and game techniques found in already existing gamified applications. A set of those elements and techniques were included in the proposed framework.
Further research was needed to investigate the impact of gamification and how to mea- sure that impact. The tendency to experience flow was chosen as a measure of engage- ment. Flow is a psychological state felt by people when they act with total involvement. People can experience flow when performing an engaging task. A high tendency to experience flow means high intrinsic motivation and a better engagement. The thesis addressed these issues by conducting an empirical study with primary education young students. The study investigated if a social learning environment with gamification tools would be more able to increase students disposition to experience flow than a non- gamified version. In this experiment, some gamified learning activities were set following the guidelines of the proposed framework.
The results from the empirical study showed that there was an improvement in the students’ disposition for flow when using the gamified version of the social learning en- vironment. The students’ average score had an increase and the statistical test taken allowed to conclude that the average score increase has statistical significance.

This paper presents a gamification framework applied to the integration of game elements in Social Learning Environments. The framework is being applied to a K6 Social Learning Environment leading to a gamified system. With this gamified system it is expected to achieve a raise in the motivation to use the platform with students becoming more loyal users. It is also expected that they will be deeper involved and engaged in educational activities supported by the environment. The proposed gamification framework includes architecture for a gamified system and a guide to help the development of gamified activities.

This paper presents a gamification framework applied in the integration of game elements in a K6 Social Learning Environment leading to a gamified system. With this gamified system it is expected to achieve a raise in the motivation to use the platform with students becaming more loyal users. It is also expected that they will be deeper involved and engaged in educational activities supported by the environment. The proposed gamification framework includes an architecture for a gamified system and a guide to help the development of gamified activities.

Gamification is the application of typical elements from video games in non-gaming contexts aiming to increase the levels of engagement and motivation of the participants in activities in those contexts. The ways to achieve this objective have been supported by the flow theory, among others. Education is considered one of the areas with greatest potential for the application of gamification. The increasing use of information and communication technologies in educational contexts and the recognition of the pedagogical potential of Web 2.0 applications, made learning supporting platforms good candidates for the application of game elements, particularly from social games. Choosing which elements to consider and how to apply them led to the need of defining a framework to assist the application of gamification. This paper presents a proposal of such a framework following previous work that has identified its general characteristics.

Project submitted for peer review:
With the musical’s Broadway success rapidly gaining momentum, The Book of Mormon team aimed to increase online engagement and social sharing of tour dates, exclusive interviews and other important content available on the musical’s website.

O contexto tecnológico atual caracteriza-se pelo acesso generalizado a grandes quantidades de informação com a componente social a assumir cada vez maior importância. A este contexto acresce o desenvolvimento da indústria dos videojogos com uma vasta comunidade de utilizadores. Recentemente, surgiu uma tendência, designada por gamification, de aplicar os elementos presentes nos jogos em atividades não lúdicas. Este novo conceito encontra na educação uma área com elevado potencial de aplicação. A investigação em curso procurará testar e validar a utilização de gamification na educação. Este trabalho apresenta as linhas de orientação e as características principais de um modelo de referência para aplicação do conceito numa plataforma de aprendizagem social.

As video games, particularly, social games are growing in popularity and number of users, there has been an increasing interest in its potential as innovative teaching tools. Gamification is a new concept intending to use elements from video games in non-game applications. Education is an area with high potential for application of this concept since it seeks to promote people’s motivation and engagement. The research in progress will try to find how to apply social gamification in education, testing and validating the results of that application. To fulfil these objectives, this paper presents the guidelines and main features of a social gamification framework to be applied in an existent K-6 social learning environment.

"As video games, particularly, social games are growing in popularity and number of users, there has been an increasing interest in its potential as innovative teaching tools. Gamification is a new concept intending to use elements from video games in non-game applications. Education is an area with high potential for application of this concept since it seeks to promote people’s motivation and engagement. The research in progrees will try to find how to apply social gamification in education, testing and validating the results of that application. To fulfill these objectives, this paper presents the guidelines and main features of a social gamification framework to be applied in an existent K-6 social learning environment.

Keywords: game-based learning, gamification, e-learning, social networks, social games."

Children and teens today grow up immersed in a myriad of digital devices, thinking and processing information in a radically different way from their predecessors. These kids usually prefer hypermedia information, learning by self-discovery, or by playing, in teams, are good at multitasking, better in digital literacy than in textual literacy, tend to be always connected, enjoy social interaction, diversity and sharing.
As a result of all of this, young “digital natives” need new ways of learning that are more interactive, participative and individualized, capable of supporting the co-creation, collaboration, and sharing of a variety of contents, combining traditional and new digital media.
To be successful, the teaching strategies, the learning contexts, and the learning spaces must accommodate these children’s needs and habits, harmoniously combining technology and pedagogy, as earliest as possible.
With the advent of Web 2.0, the way people collaborate in the creation and sharing of their own contents improved considerably, enabling everyone to be active producers and consumers at the same time, and helping them to self-organize in networks and virtual communities. It is now easy to create collaborative spaces for teachers and students to adopt a partnering pedagogy, more social and informal, but also more personal.
Personal Learning Environments (PLE) combine tools that help learners to set their own learning goals, manage their learning contents and process, to communicate with others, allowing a bidirectional flow of information between teachers and students, at a degree not possible before by traditional LMS.
In this work, we present schoooools.com (a.k.a in Portugal as escolinhas.pt), a new collaborative and social learning environment, developed and validated in several schools, following an action-research method.
Schoooools.com is being developed to be a very simple personal learning environment targeted to schools and students from 6 up to 12 years old (K-6). It follows a wiki-way philosophy for the co-creation of contents. It combines the best features of Web 2.0 relevant for schools, simplified and integrated in a single platform: easy-to-use content editors, wikis, blogs, private social networks, image galleries, calendars, private messages, chat, shared files, micro-blogging, integration with traditional LMS (ex: Moodle), integration with contents from publishers or other types of providers. It was designed with three principles in mind: educational, by providing collaborative web spaces to use in classroom, at home, everywhere, for educational purposes; entertainment, by providing appealing spaces and features to use also in leisure time, to learn by playing, chatting; social, by providing an engaging space to promote the communication and socialization within the respective private social networks.
As in real life, students, parents and teachers have different features and responsibilities in the school, but they all may communicate and collaborate between them, with privacy rules similar to the real school and its respective community.
Simply and naturally, the platform promotes a gradual adoption of the best practices on using ICT for educational purposes: in classroom or extracurricular contexts, inside or outside schools.

Keywords: Learning environments, elementary schools, e-learning, Web 2.0, personal learning environments.

Abstract: This paper discusses the positioning of e-learning systems over the recent development of the Web 2.0 and social networks. It presents a historical perspective of e-learning courses from therst distance education courses to courses supported by information and communication technologies. Trends imposed by Web 2.0 and the use of technology in society are examined with a view to its ap-plication to teaching. The paper also presents the implications of using these tools and how they arealready being implemented in what is called by e-learning 2.0. The signicance of the current conceptof e-learning and the opportunities for its application to the current reality of teaching are also discussed.
Key words:E-learning, E-learning, Web 2.0, E-learning 2.0, social software, distance learning

Este trabajo aborda el posicionamiento de los sistemas de e-learning ante el reciente desarrollo de las redes sociales y de la Web 2.0. Es presentada una perspectiva histórica del e-learning, desde los primeros cursos a distancia hasta la enseñanza apoyada en las tecnologías de información y comunicación. Las tendencias impuestas por la Web 2.0 y por el uso de tecnologías en la sociedad, en general son analizadas teniendo como objetivo su aplicación en la enseñanza. Son presentadas las implicaciones del uso de esas herramientas y la forma cómo ya están siendo aplicadas en lo designado por e-learning 2.0. , se presentan las perspectivas de desarrollo de los sistemas de e-learning 2.0 y son referidos algunos proyectos considerados como representativos del nuevo paradigma de enseñanza.

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