Jornada IHC receives Honorable Mention at UnB's Annual Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Teaching
The RPG-based gamification of the Human-Computer Interaction course, as taught in 2025, was recognized by UnB's Dean's Office for Undergraduate Education in the award's 2025 edition. In the previous edition, the honorable mention went to Alvorecer Feudal.
Brasilia, November 13, 2026
UnB’s Dean’s Office for Undergraduate Education (DEG/UnB) awarded an Honorable Mention in the Annual Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Teaching – 2025 Edition to the initiative “Jornada IHC: student protagonism through RPG gamification and project-based learning”. The initiative is coordinated by Prof. Sergio Antônio Andrade de Freitas . According to DEG, the award recognizes its contribution to strengthening the quality of undergraduate teaching practices at the University and to innovation in them.
The award refers to the 2025 offering of the Human-Computer Interaction course in the Software Engineering programme. In Jornada IHC , the class becomes a party of adventurers. Each student takes on an RPG character (Knight, Mage, Archer or Priest) and assignments become quests. The semester is built around an interface project that teams prototype, evaluate with heuristics and validate with users. The game mechanics follow the Octalysis framework: the RPG provides the motivation, and the project is where the HCI content is put into practice.
From the classroom to research
The course also leads students into research. In 2025, Ana Júlia Mendes Santos, Maria Clara Oleari de Araújo, Júlia Rocha Fortunato and Maurício Ferreira de Araújo published, together with the professor, the paper "Rethinking HCI Education: Gamification, Heuristics, and Project-Based Learning in Action" in the proceedings of INTERACT 2025 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer; DOI 10.1007/978-3-032-05008-3_55). The paper studies the course itself. Using questionnaires, statistical analysis, prototyping and user validation, it shows that combining heuristic evaluation, gamification and project-based learning improved the quality of the interfaces the students produced and the class’s engagement.
The paper is not the first piece of research to come out of Jornada IHC. In 2023, the course was the subject of two undergraduate theses (in Portuguese): one on the use of RPG in the learning process, by João Vitor Lopes de Farias, and another on the companion app for the gamified course, by Ítalo Alves Guimarães.
An award that comes back
This is not the first time the award has recognized the professor’s work. In the previous edition, the Alvorecer Feudal project received an honorable mention in the Use of technological resources / Production of innovative teaching materials category, at a ceremony held in August 2025 ( read the story ). In 2023, in the award’s first edition, the work on Learning Indicators by the A3M Programme also received an honorable mention ( read the story ).
Ceremony
The award will be presented on 18 November 2026, at 2:30 pm, in the Green Auditorium of the Institute of Chemistry (IQ/UnB), with the University’s Rector and the Dean of Undergraduate Education in attendance.