Applying Costikyan's theories to a KS1 game

During our lecture yesterday, we applied Costikyan's six key game elements to a Key Stage 1 game called 'shapes' Below are my personal views on how his theories apply to the game.


Interaction:
Although limited, there is definitely interaction in the game. The player is given a choice of three shapes and must click on the correct option to progress through the game. Unfortunately there is no penalty for choosing an incorrect shape. This means the player can continue to click on the next shape without any explanation as to why their first choice was incorrect.


Goals:
The main goal in the game is to select the correct shape from a choice of three which help to build a robot. I suppose you could argue that there are two goals from this, the first being to select the correct shape and the second to build the robot. Although the player doesn't actually get to interactively put together the robot, they are lead to believe that when a correct shape is chosen, they are helping to build it.


Struggle:
There is very little struggle in the game although it does exist. Different difficulty levels allow the player to choose a more challenging set of shapes to select from. This is the only real struggle in the game which leads it to become far too easy and simplistic.


Structure:
Just like 'struggle', there is little structure to be found in the game. having the three different difficulty levels could be classified as game structure but unfortunately the rules of the game don't allow players to influence the outcome. There is also no freedom within the game and it basically consists of a few animations and slides.


Endogenous Meaning:
For me, the endogenous meaning within the game lies in the shapes. They do have value in the game as players need to select the correct one to progress. In the real world, however, the shapes will have no value at all. A counter argument for this could be made as if the player actually learns something about shapes while playing the game, they could use that knowledge in the outside world. Therefore, it would be valuable to them in both the game and real life.


Evaluation:
Let's face it, this game could be made much, much better. Understandably, the age group for which it is aimed at may enjoy the colours, characters and background animations but this will soon get tiresome for anyone. Putting in a scoring or points system would have been an effective way of creating some competition and desire for re-playability. As it stands, I can't see anyone playing through this game more than once.
I also feel it could be much more educational, after all it is meant to be a learning tool. Some sort of feedback given to the player upon choosing the right or wrong shape would be a simple way of teaching a user about the subject. With the game as it is, any user with any ability can reach the end of the game without knowing anything about the shapes given out as choices.
That being said, even if they only play a small role in the game, Costikyan's key elements all seem to be present.