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We have iteratively designed and researched five digital games focusing on Newtonian dynamics for middle school classrooms during the past seven years. The designs have evolved dramatically in terms of the roles and relationships of the formal representations, phenomenological representations, and control schemes. Phenomenological representations can be thought of as the "world" representations that depict the actual actions and motion of a game as they occur (i.e., the central representations in most recreational games). Formal representations highlight the disciplinary relationships of interest from a pedagogical perspective (such as vector arrows, graphs, and dot traces). Our initial design perspective focused on highlighting the formal physics relationships within popular game-play mechanics. This perspective prioritized a commitment to the phenomenological representations and controls of recreational games, specifically marble-genre games. We designed formal representations around and over the phenomenological representations of that genre. Over the next seven years, we navigated the tensions between the original recreational genre and creating a new genre situated within the formal representations themselves. More specifically, our designs evolved to situate the game-play squarely in the formal representations in terms of the controls as well as in terms of the communication of goals and challenges. We backgrounded phenomenological representations and streamlined visual complexity to focus on key relationships. Our discussion compares our design evolution to the "SimCalc" design evolution recounted in IJDL's recent special issue on historic design cases.

This paper situates a critical review of studies that we have conducted within the broader research literature to analyze the affordances of integrating modeling within disciplinarily-integrated games from computational thinking and science as practice perspectives. Across the studies, the analyses pursue two themes: (a) the role of agent-based modeling as a synergistic local practice around which we can integrate computational thinking and scientific modeling within digital games and (b) the role of collaboration in leveraging those synergies. We then present a design of a disciplinarily-integrated game that integrates these themes to demonstrate one such possible instantiation of the themes. Finally, we discuss the implications for design and praxis with a particular focus on learning in classrooms across the curriculum. Specifically, we first explore the implications in terms of connecting to teachers' views of practice by framing computational modeling and computational thinking as mathematization. We then explore the implications of shifting from a focus on single players to communities of practice in terms of computational participation as science as practice. We close by exploring the pragmatic and pedagogical affordances of shifting from stand-alone single-topic games to flexible agent-based environments in terms of student development across the curriculum.

Digital games can make unique and powerful contributions to K-12 science education, but much of that potential remains unrealized. Research evaluating games for learning still relies primarily on pre- and post-test data, which limits possible insights into more complex interactions between game design features, gameplay, and formal assessment. Therefore, a critical step forward involves developing rich representations for analyzing gameplay data. This paper leverages data mining techniques to model learning and performance, using a metadata markup language that relates game actions to concepts relevant to specific game contexts. We discuss results from a classroom study and identify potential relationships between students' planning/prediction behaviors observed across game levels and improvement on formal assessments. The results have implications for scaffolding specific activities, that include physics learning during gameplay, solution planning and effect prediction. Overall, the approach underscores the value of our contextualized approach to gameplay markup to facilitate data mining and discovery.

The authors extend the theory of "disciplinary integration" of games for science education beyond the virtual world of games, and identify two key themes of a practice-based theoretical commitment to science learning: (1) materiality in the classroom, and (2) iterative design of multiple, complementary, symbolic inscriptions (e.g., graphs and agent-based programs). They also identify the affordances of their proposed approach for facilitating student learning and teacher agency.

How does deep conceptual change occur when students play well-designed educational games? To answer this question, we present a case study in the form of a microgenetic analysis of a student's processes of knowledge construction as he played a conceptually-integrated digital game (SURGE Next) designed to support learning about Newtonian mechanics. Grounded in the Knowledge In Pieces framework of conceptual change (A. diSessa, 1993), we analyze the processes through which the student, Jamal, developed an expert-like understanding of deflections, a phenomenon that has been previously identified as challenging to understand for novice physics learners. We also explore the key characteristics of SURGE Next supporting these conceptual change processes. Our analysis shows that Jamal's learning involved iterative refinement of his conceptual understanding through distributed encoding (A. diSessa, 1993). That is, as Jamal advanced through the game levels in SURGE Next, he developed a progressively more distributed sense of mechanism (A. diSessa, 1993) and was able to identify and operationalize the roles of the direction and magnitude of an object's initial (or previous) velocity in determining the velocity resulting from the application of a new impulse. We also discuss the methodological and design implications of our findings for future research on digital games for learning. [An earlier version of this article was presented at the National Association of Research in Science Teaching Conference, 2013.]

Background: In this paper, we investigate the relationship between theory and design in the context of creating digital games to support children's development of scientific expertise. Synthesis: Theoretically, we consider two frameworks--Knowledge in Pieces (or KiP) and Science as Practice (or SaP). While KiP is a theory about the structure of human knowledge, SaP is a theoretical perspective about the development of scientific expertise that emphasizes the deeply intertwined nature of conceptual development and the development of epistemic and representational practices. We then synthesize research on modeling and games from our research group and others to create a composite argument and theoretical framing for the importance of "disciplinary integration" in the design of digital games for science learning. Conclusions: We show how shifting from KiP to SaP as the underlying theoretical anchor in our designs results in shifting from focusing on "conceptual integration" to focusing on "disciplinary integration." We first present our initial framing and design around conceptual integration. We then trace the evolution and rationale for disciplinary integration across our development and research on four game platforms. Finally, we discuss the implications and generalizability of disciplinary integration across the design of digital games for science learning.

How does deep conceptual change occur when students play well-designed educational games? To answer this question, we present a case study in the form of a microgenetic analysis of a student’s processes of knowledge construction as he played a conceptually-integrated digital game (SURGE Next) designed to support learning about Newtonian mechanics. Grounded in the Knowledge In Pieces framework of conceptual change (A. diSessa, 1993), we analyze the processes through which the student, Jamal, developed an expert-like understanding of deflections, a phenomenon that has been previously identified as challenging to understand for novice physics learners. We also explore the key characteristics of SURGE Next supporting these conceptual change processes. Our analysis shows that Jamal’s learning involved iterative refinement of his conceptual understanding through distributed encoding (A. diSessa, 1993). That is, as Jamal advanced through the game levels in SURGE Next, he developed a progressively more distributed sense of mechanism (A. diSessa, 1993) and was able to identify and operationalize the roles of the direction and magnitude of an object’s initial (or previous) velocity in determining the velocity resulting from the application of a new impulse. We also discuss the methodological and design implications of our findings for future research on digital games for learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Environments in which learning involves coordinating multiple external representations (MERs) can productively support learners in making sense of complex models and relationships. Educational digital games provide an increasing popular medium for engaging students in manipulating and exploring such models and relationships. This article applies cognitive science research on MERs to a range of popular educational and recreational games that focus on the interpretation and manipulation of models. We leverage the literatures on embodied cognition, adaptive scaffolding, science education, and dynamic visualizations to address the challenges, trade-offs, and questions highlighted by the research. We apply these research-derived design considerations to analyze (a) the extent and forms through which the design considerations are reflected in the design of the games, (b) the implications for designing effective model-based games for learning, and (c) the implications for future research on MERs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]