EletroWizard: an educational game for formative assessment and meaningful learning of physics concepts

Physics Education faces both theoretical and methodological challenges related to teaching and assessment processes, which hinder students’ learning of scientific concepts. In response to this issue, this study presents the serious game EletroWizard, designed as a gamified tool for assessing the development of concepts related to energy and electrostatics. This qualitative research employed the Theory of Meaningful Learning (TML) as its conceptual framework and Discursive Textual Analysis (DTA) as the methodological approach for analyzing discursive data. The Gamified Potentially Meaningful Teaching Unit (G-PMTU) was adopted as a teaching methodology with third-year high school students from public schools in Brazil. The results of the DTA concerning students’ prior knowledge revealed a fragmented and decontextualized understanding of the main investigated concepts. Moreover, improvements were observed at the end of the pedagogical process through the analysis of conceptual questions embedded in the educational game, with better performance achieved in contextualized questions. EletroWizard proved to be an important tool for fostering students’ active participation, making the learning process more engaging and meaningful.

Keywords:
Physics Education; Assessment; Serious Game; Theory of Meaningful Learning (TML); Gamification.