SURGE’s Evolution Deeper into Formal Representations: The Siren’s Call of Popular Game-Play Mechanics

Abstract

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.

Worked Examples in Physics Games: Challenges in Integrating Proven Cognitive Scaffolds into Game Mechanics

“…The game used for this study was an updated version of the conceptually-integrated educational physics game known as The Fuzzy Chronicles [12][13][14]. During the game, the player takes on the role of the space pilot Surge who is trying to help a group of aliens known as Fuzzies.…”

Digital Games in the Science Classroom: Leveraging Internal and External Scaffolds during Game Play

“…(3) What are the implications of these observations for teachers and game designers? (Figures 1 and 2) is the prototypical DIG template that we used in this study, and is the result of evolution of design, research, and thinking chronicled in Clark et al [4,5]. Whereas earlier versions of SURGE supported reflection on the results of game play through formal representations as a means to support strategy refinement, the formal representations were not the medium through which players planned, implemented, and manipulated their game strategies.…”

“…We have developed a disciplinarily integrated game (DIG) such that players' actions in the game focus on iteratively developing and manipulating formal representations as the core game mechanics [4,5]. These formal representations are computational and mathematized representations of focal science phenomena.…”

Multiplayer Disciplinarily-Integrated Agent-Based Games: SURGE Gameblox

“…Developing environments from Science as Practice perspectives [4][5][6][7] that engage students in modeling would seem to hold great promise. Toward these goals, we have proposed DisciplinarilyIntegrated Games as one such approach [8][9]. As proposed in Clark et al [8], disciplinary integration is an approach to designing games in terms of a science as practice perspective.…”

“…Early work on DIGs focused on Cartesian time-series analyses as the formal representations for communicating challenges and opportunities as well as the formal representations through which players control the game [8][9]. To have value, the proposed DIG genre must be generalizable.…”