ABSTRACT
Context: Before starting the development of a final thesis, there are
several challenges for both faculty advisors and university students.
For professors, notoriously, there is the great challenge of finding
students who want to participate in the development of their academic
projects. For students, the difficulty of finding projects or
teachers who want to work on their ideas is recurrent. Objective:
The goal of this work is to propose and evaluate a tool called Plugue,
to support the project-based learning approach and manage topic
ideas projects in the academic community. Method: A survey with
82 Brazilian academic students and professors was conducted to
collect information about the perception of the utility, perception
of use, and intention to use the tool using the TAM3 model. An
analysis of the collected data was conducted according to explore
data and generate results. Results: We identified the characteristics
of participants, current scenario, and perceptions of utility, use, and
intended use according to the level of agreement of participants.
Conclusions: Our study indicates that the approaches used and the
features of the Plugue tool are promising and suitable for higher
education and confirm the need for the tool for universities.