Serious Game Design and Evaluation: Light Propagation and Reflection in Elementary Education

"Fotogonies" is a low-cost, logic-based Android puzzle game designed to teach light propagation and reflection to 5th- and 6th-grade students. Players rotate mirrors to guide a laser beam to a target across ten levels of gradually increasing difficulty, with progression governed by a formula that combines available moves, mirror counts, and required mirrors. The design was grounded in eight educational requirements, including scientific fidelity, mechanics, challenge, and accessibility, and incorporated WCAG 2.1 AA contrast checks and colour-blindness testing. Early formative testing with adults and children aged 11 to 12 led primarily to visual refinements and revealed that children's self-reported ratings of consistency, learnability, and difficulty were less dependable than qualitative feedback.

The central evaluation involved a mixed-methods study with 44 sixth-grade students, roughly 11 years old, who played in pairs. Of 39 valid System Usability Scale responses, the mean score was 83.53, with about 92 percent exceeding the widely used benchmark of 68, indicating good usability. Overall satisfaction on the Questionnaire for User Interface Satisfaction reached 7.82 out of 9. Observational data proved more trustworthy than children's self-reports on several dimensions, and pre- and post-test comparisons suggested that the game strengthened conceptual understanding of how light travels and reflects.

The study's scope is focused on elementary education in a single grade level and on one Android-based title, with evaluation concentrated on usability, satisfaction, and short-term learning gains rather than long-term retention or cross-cultural applicability. The paper situates its contribution within existing research on serious games in primary and science education, drawing on systematic reviews and recent work on immersive physics learning. Its appended instruments, including an adapted ten-item usability questionnaire and a satisfaction inventory covering screen design, terminology, and learning, offer reusable tools for researchers evaluating similar educational games.