ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 world pandemic and the ensuing closure of schools has resulted in unprecedented emergency remote teaching. In teaching-learning settings in Northeastern Brazil, teachers often face challenges when they try to use innovative pedagogical approaches and introduce innovative technologies to transform students into agents of change in our culturally diverse world through the application of learning. Such challenges were augmented further with the pandemic as the forced systemic use of these technologies was no longer a pedagogical choice but was quickly turned into the general rule for all educators – even those who were not familiar with these technologies. In addition, pandemic traumas such as domestic confinement, social isolation, fear, uncertainty, and anxiety about the future, weakened the emotional health of everyone involved in education by reducing or sometimes even paralyzing the creative processes essential to learning. The result of this new condition was a tangible increase in dropout rates, poor school performance and low self-esteem for teachers and students alike. Home confinement also increased domestic violence, including child abuse and particularly, violence against women. This paper presents a serious game, called Despandemia, for building libraries of interactive gamified books and ubiquitous reading communities. The game is accessible by cell phone and based on the humanistic performative attitude of a teacher-reader in collaborative projects of online socio-cultural entrepreneurship. Despandemia was used and evaluated by 119 students of an “Introduction to Computer Science” course, in which participants considered violence against women as a predominant theme of the pandemic. Results indicate that the game has a positive influence on 1) decreasing course dropout;2) improving learning performance;and 3) creating connected communities of readers to prevent violence against women. Copyright © 2021 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved