Research suggests thatself-explanation functionality can effectively support learningin the context of digital games. Research also highlights challenges, however,in balancing and integrating the demands and abstraction of self-explanation functionality with the demands and structure of the game. These challenges are particularly true for games that are, themselves, cognitively more complex. The current study presents an approach that adapts the abstraction of self-explanation prompts based on a player's performance. The results demonstrate that students in this condition (a) scored significantly higher on the post-test than students whose selfexplanation prompts were not adaptively adjusted and were always abstract and (b) scored higher, but not significantly so, than students who did not receive the self-explanation functionality. Analyses of gameplay metrics suggest that trade-offs in terms of progress through the game may explain some aspects of these post-test comparisons. Analyses also demonstrate that both self-explanation conditions significantly outperformed the navigation-only comparison conditionon agameplay metric that suggests deeper model-based thinking.

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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.

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Clark, Sengupta, Brady, Martinez-Garza, and Killingsworth (2015) and Sengupta and Clark (submitted) propose disciplinarily-integrated games as a generalizable template for supporting students in interpreting, manipulating, and translating across phenomenological and formal representations in support of a Science as Practice perspective (Pickering, 1995; Lehrer & Schauble, 2006). To explore the generalizability of disciplinarily-integrated games, this chapter proposes other hypothetical examples of disciplinarily-integrated games in physics, biology, chemistry, and the social sciences. We explore disciplinarily-integrated games in three categories, beginning with the category involving the nearest and simplest transfer of the template and extending to the category involving the furthest and most complex transfer: (1) time-series analyses with Cartesian formal representations, (2) constraint-system analyses with Cartesian formal representations, and (3) other model types and non-Cartesian formal representations. We close with the discussion of the implications of this generalizability.