Well-designed games can scaffold student learning (Clark, Nelson, Sengupta, & D'Angelo, 2009). Research on games for learning, however, has generally focused on investigating overall effectiveness of games or designs rather than analyzing the specific processes of conceptual change through which students learn. In this paper, we present a case study in the form of 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. We present the key characteristics of SURGE Next responsible for conceptual integration, and grounded in the Knowledge In Pieces framework of conceptual change (diSessa, 1993;Smith, diSessa & Roschelle, 1993), identify the process 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 (diSessa, 1993). Our analysis shows that Jamal's conceptual change involved iterative refinement of his conceptual understanding through a process known as distributed encoding (diSessa, 1993). That is, as Jamal advanced through the game levels in SURGE Next, he developed a progressively Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 06:35 01 October 2015 A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t CONCEPTUAL CHANGE IN DIGITAL GAMES 2 more distributed sense of mechanism (diSessa, 1993). This in turn enabled Jamal 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 discuss the implications of our findings for the design of conceptually-integrated games for learning as well as the implications of the research methodology for future research on games for science learning.

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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.

Digital games can be used as a productive and engaging medium to foster scientific expertise and have shown promise in supporting the co-development of scientific concepts and representational practices. This study focuses on the integration of a disciplinarily-integrated game, SURGE NextG, with complementary model-based activities to support the development of scientific modeling in Newtonian mechanics. Two pedagogical approaches were designed. Students in both approaches modeled the motion of an object inside and outside the game environment. One approach involved the material integration of virtual game play through a physical modeling activity in the classroom. The second approach involved a complementary modeling tool using an agent-based computational programming platform. While both modeling activities demonstrated affordances to support productive student learning, this study highlights the significance of designing multiple complementary representations of the same phenomenon as a core element of game play and related modeling activities.

We have developed a disciplinarily integrated game (DIG) to support students in interpreting, translating, and manipulating across formal representations in the domain of Newtonian kinematics. In this study, we seek to understand what game play looks like in a classroom context with particular attention given to how students leverage internal and external scaffolds to progress through the game and deepen their conceptual knowledge. We investigate the following questions: (1) In what ways do students interact with the game, with each other, and with their teacher when they play SURGE Symbolic in a classroom environment? (2) How do game scaffolds, both within and outside of the game, support or impede student learning and game play? (3) What are the implications of these observations for teachers and game designers? We found that although most students used internal scaffolds in some way to assist their game play, many found that these scaffolds were insufficient to get through challenges. They quickly sought help from external resources available to them outside the game to help them advance in the game. The source of information they needed to make progress came from various people or resources outside the game, what we are calling "knowers."