An engineering educational application developed for the Brazilian digital TV system

Recent studies pointed out that Brazil has a deficiency of about 40.000 engineers. It is well known the continental dimension of this country turning any nationwide educational policy difficult to be implemented satisfactorily. Indeed, in order to be successful it is necessary to create a program able to cover the whole country and with good acceptance of the population. Television is the most popular source of entertainment and information of the Brazilian population being present in approximately 90% of the homes. Nowadays, the Brazilian TV system is moving from analog to digital. That means that will be possible to offer personal interactive services such as home banking, games and most importantly, educational programs. That is the main objective of this work: to investigate and present the necessary elements for developing interactive educational systems for Digital TV (DTV). The paper starts with a study of the technologies involved in the development of such systems, as well as an analysis of the necessary elements for the proper use of DTV educational applications and the importance of this new media in teaching engineering. A basic application is presented in order to validate the involved theory. Furthermore, as a concluding experience, an interactive game developed for teaching computing engineering principles is presented. Finally, the results obtained when the educational application was used in a class of high school teenagers are presented.