More than 10 years ago, our team-consisting of instructional designers, game developers, science education experts, and researchers-began work on a set of four digital science games and instructional materials for middle-school educators. Collectively called Possible Worlds, with funding from the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (Award # R305C080022), and later the National Science Foundation (DRL-1252382), we were motivated by the desire to provide teachers with engaging and easy-to-use resources to help students overcome persistent science misconceptions and gain a deeper understanding of abstract science concepts that can be difficult to visualize. For example, students often struggle to understand the concept that a solid material like plant matter can be made from a liquid (water) and a gas (carbon dioxide). Students (and adults) who cannot imagine processes that take place at the molecular level are likely to hold the misconception that plants “eat” a solid material such as soil and transform that into plant matter, another solid material.
CITATION STYLE
Martin, W., Silander, M., Culp, K. M. M., Brunner, C., & Parris, J. (2020). Supports for Digital Science Games: Visualizing and Mapping Analogies. In Handbook of Research in Educational Communications and Technology: Learning Design: Fifth Edition (pp. 769–788). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36119-8_36
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