Supports for Digital Science Games: Visualizing and Mapping Analogies

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.