Fotonica in Gioco: A Game-Design Contest for Science Communication in Italian High Schools

The paper reports on the fifth edition (2024–2025) of Fotonica in Gioco, a national game-design contest for Italian upper-secondary students run by the CNR Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies. Students designed original educational board games on the open theme "Challenges," using game design as a vehicle for science communication and interdisciplinary STEAM learning. The contest is framed within constructionist and Game Design-Based Learning theory, with the aim of fostering systems thinking, collaboration, and design literacy alongside scientific understanding.

Eighteen prototypes were submitted by teams from nine Italian cities, involving roughly 166 students and 18 teachers across a range of school tracks, with an estimated gender split of about 60% female and 40% male. The games addressed sustainability, scientific reasoning, social decision-making, and technological futures, and commonly used mechanics such as dice-based movement, card events, quizzes, set collection, and mission systems. The authors note that students produced mechanically coherent designs despite having no prior game-design training and only written guidelines and organizational mentoring.

The evaluation is an exploratory case study based on voluntary, anonymous post-activity questionnaires completed by 57 students and 10 teachers, analysed mainly through descriptive mean ratings on five-point Likert items. Students rated overall appreciation highly (3.88/5) and reported the strongest perceived impact on creativity and problem solving (3.79/5), project management (3.68/5), and teamwork (3.51/5), with support for formal curricular learning rated more moderately (2.93/5). Reported difficulties centred on time management, rule formalization, and idea generation. The authors acknowledge that the self-selected sample, reliance on self-reported perceptions, and lack of pre/post or comparison-group measures preclude causal claims, and they propose more structured mentoring, intermediate milestones, and earlier playtesting for future editions.