A Mirror's Tale: a University of Geneva game on light reflection

A Mirror's Tale was developed by Robin Pétermann at TECFA, the educational technology unit of the School of Psychology and Education at the University of Geneva. The Serious Games Showcase & Challenge listed it among its 2018 student finalists.

Players take the role of a Korrigan, a small dwarf from Breton folklore, who is trapped in a dungeon with a talking fairy companion. The only way out is through a series of levels built on light puzzles. The one item the player carries is a mirror shield, which reflects bullets and light, so every fight and every puzzle comes down to steering light with it. Players collect gemstones that give them new powers and let them go further.

The physics is part of the mechanics instead of a quiz laid over them. To get past a guard or open a door, the player has to apply what reflection does to a ray, so knowledge is needed to progress. By the end, students are expected to understand the light ray, the angle of incidence, reflection and refraction, to measure angles, and to use the law of refraction for simple calculations.

The game is aimed at high school students learning physics, with 15-year-olds named as the main audience. To suit a mixed group, early levels let players experiment with basic moves at their own pace in platform phases of jumping and dodging while collecting gems. Later enigma phases are slower and add harder problem-solving.

The game assesses progress through play. Completing a level shows that the player has applied reflection and refraction correctly, and the more gemstones collected in a level, the more the player should have retained about the calculations. How far a player gets in a reasonable number of attempts serves as a second measure of what was learned.

The game page at tecfa.unige.ch is online and serves an HTML5 version that runs in the browser, without a plugin. The page asks for a browser that supports HTML5 and otherwise opens the game directly. The contest entry lists Construct 2 as the engine and a browser as the operating system, and names the primary audience as 15-year-old students learning physics in high school. The School of Psychology and Education at the University of Geneva is the unit named as home of the project.