Engineering Instructional Metaphors Within Virtual Environments to Enhance Visualization

Abstract

Digital games worlds are systems of objects, their properties, behaviors, and the relations between them. They are immensely popular with people of all ages, currently especially the young. The educational community has begun to notice that game worlds present an attractive possibility for enhancing conventional educational achievement. The greatest potential of instructional games actually derives from the structural isomorphism between game worlds and conceptual worlds. This chapter describes how that isomorphism can be achieved through the use of structure mapping theory. A game world designed through applied structure mapping provides a way to introduce novices to expert thinking by making that thinking visible and embodied through a concrete metaphor.