An Educational Game for the Heat Conceptual Profile Mapping

The conceptual profile establishes that a concept can be dispersed and that anyone can have different ways of understanding reality in their different concepts. The profile is compost by several zones that correspond to a way of thinking. The conceptual profile of heat, for example, presents the realistic, animistic, substantialist, empirical and rationalist zones. From this, we propose an educational game as a way of mapping these zones of the conceptual profile of heat. The Trilha Termoquímica game (Figure 1) was applied in classes of EJA of a public school in Goiânia city. We observed that in the initial phases of the game that works initial definition of heat the students responded within the realistic zone (heat as sensation). In the intermediate stages on endothermic and exothermic processes and heat units, the students responded in the animist (heat as living), substantiist (heat as inert substance) and empirical (heat as temperature) zones. In the final stages the students answered the questions within the rationalist zone (heat as energy resulting from the temperature difference), making possible the teaching of thermochemistry in the game. The game was able to map the zones of the conceptual profile, considering the free expression of the students, besides teaching the content and entertaining. Using this activity we know the conceptions that were placed in the center of the class and avoid conflicts when faced with scientific concepts.