SURGE: intended and unintended science learning in games

Research Goals and Theoretical Framework. This poster considers data from two studies and highlights the potential for both intended and unintended student learning in games. School science, with its focus on explicit formalized knowledge structures, seldom connects to or builds upon students' tacit intuitive understandings. Well-designed commercial video games, however, are exceptionally successful at helping learners build accurate intuitive understandings of the concepts and processes embedded in the games due to the situated and enacted nature of good game play. Most commercial games fall short as platforms for learning, however, because they do not help students articulate and connect their evolving intuitive understandings to more explicit formalized structures that would support transfer of knowledge to other contexts. In Thought and Language, Vygotsky (1986) discusses the potential for leveraging intuitive understandings from everyday experience ("spontaneous concepts") with instructed scientific concepts to build robust understandings. The question remains whether or not the intuitive spontaneous concepts developed in games can be successfully leveraged into robust instructed concepts in the format and terminology of academic assessment and across domains recognized as central by the scientific disciplines themselves.