Pixel: an undergraduate thesis gamifies learning of usability criteria
Érico Maximiano Bandeira defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis introducing Pixel — a gamified tool for learning usability criteria during interface evaluation.
Brasília, May 5, 2022
Teaching usability has its own paradox: it is content whose main virtue is intuition — and it is rarely trained through trial and error. The undergraduate thesis defended in May 2022 by Érico Maximiano Bandeira tackles that paradox with a tool, advised by Prof. Sergio Antônio Andrade de Freitas .
Pixel — the tool designed in the work — places the usability evaluation process inside a gamified loop. Students go through scenarios where they must apply usability criteria to real interfaces, receiving structured feedback on hits, doubts, and misses. The goal is not to replace formal study, but to offer the missing practice field: a guided, sequenced, and comparative exercise that consolidates the criteria into active reading capability.
The work sits at the intersection of Gamification and active learning , and brings into the HCI classroom an instrument whose very design mirrors the content it teaches — an internal consistency often missing in educational software.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions.