Engagement in digital games and web applications using adaptive matching-to-sample tasks in teaching reading

Over the last years, several interactive environments were developed to promote the individualized teaching. These systems can use behavioral procedures to generate tasks and for improving reading skills. This paper proposes two learning interactive environments, a digital game, and a web application, that uses a matching-to-sample procedure to teach reading abilities, where the tasks are adapted to the students by a framework based on evolutionary computing. We applied an experiment to identify the engagement of 22 students assigned from a class offirst graders of a Brazilian public school. The students were divided into 4 groups and their data was collected for two days. In questions of engagement, the digital game showed superior acceptance in the use of teaching tasks.