Enigmas da Casa Verde: gamification as a poetic and political crossing in the training of readers

Abstract

Among the labyrinths of a school that still resists emptying of meanings, emerges a practice that, instead of domesticating reading, liberates it: gamification as a poetic, interdisciplinary, and transformative experience. This study, cut from a research at the doctoral level in Education, investigates the effects of gamified strategies - such as Escape Room and Escape Book - on the development of critical reading and students' engagement in the final years of elementary school. From a hermeneutic approach, with participant observation and analysis of gamified activities developed in the classroom, the work reveals that the use of playful and challenging narratives, anchored in literary works, produces an immersive and co-creative learning space. The game “Enigmas na Casa Verde”, inspired by the work of Machado de Assis, exemplifies how the articulation between technology, literature, and collaboration can promote more sensitive and dialogical readings, awakening (inter)subjectivity and breaking with mechanistic teaching logics. The results indicate that gamification, in dialogue with a more democratic and aesthetic school culture, is able to redesign the place of reading in public schools, making it a bridge between the search for knowledge and being, between play and civic education. Thus, gamify is also to educate poetically and create together, with your feet on the classroom floor and your eyes on the possible future.