Abstract:

The Covid-19 outbreak caused the abrupt closing of Italian schools at the end of February 2020. Teachers were suddenly asked to rethink their educational approach, without having had time to prepare, while letting the students know that they had not been left alone.

With the aim to keep in touch with the students and keep up their motivation, an activity was developed in the form of a videogame-like interactive quiz on the topic of Special Relativity (SR). In this particular case, the topic of SR had only just been covered when the schools were shut down, which also posed a critical issue in terms of how to assess the learning process without conventional oral or written tests.

The school in which the project was developed had already been using the GSuite platform for a few years, therefore it was easy to communicate with the students in an active Google Classroom. Within this learning environment, the videogame was developed via Google Forms. This widely known platform allows to create different paths within quizzes depending on the answers submitted by the players, much like a gamebook.

In this game, entitled “Albert vs. Coronavirus” the students play the role of Albert Einstein on a quest to defeat the SARS-CoV19 virus. The player must answer questions concerning the basic SR topics in order to progress in the game, which is ended in case of particularly big mistakes. Taking advantage of the options available in Google Forms, a few “saving points” (like in a videogame) could be introduced, in order to allow the players to resume their game from an intermediate point in case of wrong answers.

In an attempt to motivate the students, the game plot was written in an ironic register, with puns and secondary characters (i.e. a parody of myself) devised to entertain the players.

The game was tested with a class of 16 students (age 18-19) on their final high school year. The scores obtained by the students were found to match quite reasonably their “conventional” grades in Physics, and a satisfaction survey indicated that the activity may be promising for future employment.

This game has been awarded the first prize by the Italian association for physics education (Associazione Italiana della Fisica, AIF) in their yearly contest for innovations in teaching physics. The game is currently available in Italian only [1] but an English translation is in progress.

References:
[1] https://forms.gle/58Zrdxcn9HuKnYLr8

Keywords:

Physics, Remote teaching, Special relativity, Covid19, Game-based learning.