Designing for the epistemological entailments of physics through game-centered dialogical activity cycles.

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Page 1

Zuiker, S. J., Anderson, K., Lee, J. L. H., & Chee, Y. S. (in press). Designing for the epistemological entailments of physics through
game-centered dialogical activity cycles. Paper to be presented at the bi-annual International Conference of the Learning
Sciences.

Designing for the Epistemological Entailments of Physics
through Game-centered Dialogical Activity Cycles
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March 3, 2008

Steven J. Zuiker, Kate T. Anderson, Judy Lai Har Lee, & Yam San Chee
Learning Sciences Laboratory, National Institute of Education, Singapore
email: steven.zuiker@nie.edu.sg, katherine.anderson@nie.edu.sg, judy.lee@nie.edu.sg, yamsan.chee@nie.edu.sg


Abstract: This study examines a secondary-level science curriculum centered on a multi-user,
“serious game” called Escape from Centauri 7. The game engine depicts qualitative physics
phenomena via dynamics tied to player actions. Players progressively engage the epistemological
entailments of charged particles through new phenomena they encounter as the game unfolds. We
engineered discretely bounded gaming episodes to arrange transitions between game play, small
group, and whole class discussions. Together, these elements of game play and discussion
constitute recurring, game-centered dialogic activity cycles. Through this design, we investigate
how gaming fosters intuitive physics understandings, how activity structures and materials engage
learners and enlist gaming experiences in discussion, and how both game play and discussion
shape subsequent participation. Analyses of trajectories of participation in and across cycles
underscore the plausibility of this approach while also illuminating emerging tensions that we
discuss in terms of epistemic reflexivity.


Introduction
This study details our efforts to design for engaged participation across a series of problem scenarios
involving the dynamics of charged particles. Using the affordances of a gaming engine, we engineered a
“curriculum-based ecosystem” (Barab & Roth, 2006) through which students engage the functional properties of
charged particles as a means to escape from a distant planet and, in this pursuit, to seek out more knowledgeable
others who can guide ongoing engagement (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990).

Throughout the curriculum, we strive to encourage learners to appreciate the productive tensions between
formal science and the everyday world from which it emerges (Barab, Zuiker, et al., 2007). Generally, the work of
scientists reifies natural phenomena in terms of seemingly abstract terms and principles. However, sociological
studies of science illustrate the many ways in which such a process of reification generates a kind of audit trail (e.g.,
data files, log books, and charts) that ultimately points back to a very concrete origin (Latour, 1987). Schooling,
though, often presents scientific formalisms as a sort of independent reality (Bruner, 1995). Rather than a process of
reification that transforms concrete everyday experience into formal notions, science as seen through the lens of
traditional curricula appears to exist apart from our everyday experiences. In an effort to strike a balance between
the necessary value of both content and context, our design effort attempts to engage students in a context-of-use
through which science content can become meaningful, rather than simply framing content with an artifice of
context. To this end, we use a gaming engine to facilitate immersive experiences in a science-fiction narrative where
physics phenomena are deeply relevant to participating in and advancing through a progression of events.
Importantly, representing the physical world in terms of multiple, simultaneous events in a game space contrasts
with the linear, succession of equations and texts.

In this curricular endeavor, we developed classroom activity structures that engage learners in a dynamic
interplay between gaming, discussion, and reflection in order to support and extend students’ intuitive
understandings of physics (Chee, 2007). Such activity structures and supporting materials often remain under
discussed, if not underspecified, in research involving technological innovations used in classroom communities
(Bielaczyc, 2006). The complementarity that we arrange between gaming and classroom activity structures supports
and illuminates students’ sense-making practices. On the one hand, the multiple simultaneous features operating in
the game embed the epistemological entailments of a formal discipline like physics (e.g., the interactions and
relations that underlie Newtonian mechanics in the first place) as part of goal-directed activities. At the same time,
these situated perspectives remain grounded in a player’s intuitive understanding of particular game scenarios
without an appreciation for their broader implications (e.g., Bereiter, 1997). Discursive activity in such scenarios

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Zuiker, S. J., Anderson, K., Lee, J. L. H., & Chee, Y. S. (in press). Designing for the epistemological entailments of physics through
game-centered dialogical activity cycles. Paper to be presented at the bi-annual International Conference of the Learning
Sciences.

helps to connect situated and general appreciations of physics by motivating deep reflection and a process of both
negotiation and reification of individual experiences in relation to broader webs of meaning. Our efforts to embed
game-based learning in classroom dialogic activity instantiate recurring cycles of experience and reflection. As we
theorize these cycles, the curricular design arranges a trajectory of participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) through
which students work to reify game play in terms of the expert knowledge and the unique value system of scientists
(Wenger, 1998; Rogoff, 1990). Given this perspective, three questions organize the design and analyses we report:
1. In what ways can game play foster intuitive understandings of particle-field interactions?
2. In what ways do students and teachers enlist the intuitive phenomena of Escape from Centauri 7 to
formalize their understanding of the dynamics of charged particles?
3. How does Escape from Centauri 7 transform or perturb epistemic practices and modes of participation in
classroom learning ecologies?

Theoretical Background
Relative to our three interrelated research questions, we theorize ways in which students and small groups
formalize their learning experiences as they engage in increasingly complex forms of activity (Rogoff, 1990, 1995).
Consistent with situative theories of learning, we conceive of meaning as inherently perspectival and embedded in
pervasive background conditions (Greeno & van de Sande, 2007; Rommetveit, 1998). Meaning in this sense weaves
together seemingly elemental aspects of perception and broader social themes. As one example, Varela, Thompson,
and Rosch (1991) advanced an argument as to why even ostensibly fundamental qualities of our experience, such as
color perception, remain inescapably embodied in both a biological and cultural history of structural coupling
through which their meaning is instantiated. As another example, Geertz (2000) details how a Zande boy and
western anthropologist use the “same” data to explain the boy’s infection in terms of witchcraft and carelessness,
respectively. From this standpoint, an individual’s point-of-view coupled with a network of distributed
epistemological entailments constitute meaning. Grounded in these inextricable ties between perception, cognition,
and culture, we discuss how our design efforts instantiate and develop both a curricular design and local theory of
game-centered dialogic activities.

Engaging the Dynamics of Charged Particles
Many of the central insights of physics remain sequestered to atomic or sub-atomic levels and thereby also
remain elusive phenomena for learners to grasp. For example, students traditionally only engage electromagnetism
quantitatively in terms of partial differential equations. While these equations provide an elegant summary, they
remain an elusive shorthand for understanding the qualitative phenomena underlying electromagnetism. In fact, the
calculus involved in predicting the behavior of charged particles in a field preceded its scientific understanding by
several decades (Feynman, 1963). That is, only some time after Newton and Leibniz’s mathematical inventions did
physicists conceptualize forces that act at a distance, suggesting that these equations alone, while useful, were not
crucial for unlocking these ideas. Moreover, many science educators now promote the value of conceptual physics
(Forbus, 1984, 1997) and intuitive understandings (diSessa, 1993, 2000). Complementing these trends, several
different technologies have been used to arrange opportunities to engage physics qualitatively. As one such
technology, interactive digital media provide an altogether different foundation for learning grounded in the
learner’s experience of a dynamic representational system and her efforts to manipulate it. For example, rather than
allowing the dynamics of electromagnetism to unfold through linear texts and equations, games (Squire et al., 2004)
and simulations (Dori & Belcher, 2005) provide multiple, simultaneous perspectives on physical phenomena that
locate meaning in the player’s efforts to uncover the functional relations between charged particles and fields.

Dialogic Activity Cycles in Game-Based Learning
Serious games are not a “technotopia” that can singularly transform classroom learning (Oppenheimer,
2003). Rather, games can be enabling tools insofar as they support social transactions among learners and with
teachers. Bearing this in mind, we have deliberately designed for the interplay between game play and classroom
discussion in our curriculum. Shared experiences engender a “reciprocal faith” (Rommetveit, 1985, p.189) that
learners have had the same opportunity to learn (Gee, 2005). That is, common gaming experiences provide
increasing degrees of collective intersubjectivity. These shared experiences, in turn, afford individuals credibility in
their joint work of negotiating scientific meaning. We seek to leverage both affordances in order to engage learners
in dialogic activity. Through discussion between groups and with the teacher, gaming experiences can be reified in
terms of the concepts and language of physics. In this way, content emerges through context. As such, classroom
discussions are shaped by prior experience while also working to shape subsequent engagement.
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Zuiker, S. J., Anderson, K., Lee, J. L. H., & Chee, Y. S. (in press). Designing for the epistemological entailments of physics through
game-centered dialogical activity cycles. Paper to be presented at the bi-annual International Conference of the Learning
Sciences.


Our efforts to design complementary gaming and classroom activities in this study are grounded in
Rogoff’s (1995) three “planes” of sociocultural activity. Personal, interpersonal, and community planes mutually
constitute sociocultural activity. Recurring game- and classroom-based activity structures arrange successive
material-social transactions while students engage a looping sequence of activities. As it is represented in Figure 1
below, each cycle begins with small groups of students working together side-by-side as co-participants in the game
space. By coordinating their actions to achieve functional ends, peers build increasing degrees of intersubjectivity
through language, gesture, game commands, and other meaning-making strategies. The cycle continues as each
small group works face-to-face to summarize and synthesize their shared experiences. The cycle concludes with a
whole class activity in which selected groups debrief their peers and engage in critical discussions. As necessary, the
teacher may also provide just-in-time lectures that capitalize on tensions that surface during discussions or
presentations. In both the game and classroom spaces, student activity fosters a dialogic interplay in which learning
is a transactional process of reifying gaming phenomena in terms of more formal physics notions. Consistent with
Rogoff’s planes of sociocultural activity, this cycle arranges a trajectory of participation through which students’
personal experiences with the game and interpersonal discussions about shared game experiences create challenges
that position the teacher to guide participation and mediate the practices of physics.
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Figure 1. The interplay of activity structures across dialogic activity cycles.

Methods
We employed a concurrent-nested approach to multi-method research (Cresswell, 2002), using a
quantitative measure of performance on pre-post assessments to complement an overarching qualitative analysis of
student participation with the curriculum. After describing the participants and the curriculum, we provide details
about the data we generated and how we analyzed it in light of our research questions.

Participants
We maintain an ongoing partnership with the physics department at a private, all boys secondary school in
Singapore. We have worked with one teacher, Mr. Ong (all names are pseudonyms), during both the current study
for which he served as instructor and one previous study taught by our team. Thirty-six students (ages 14-15)
volunteered to participate in a 12-hour elective physics module. As “express stream” students, all participants
performed nationally in the top 20% on high stakes assessments, which is similar to gifted programs in the U.S.

Curriculum
Building on current media and science discussions about Mars exploration, Escape from Centauri 7 is a
serious game that encourages students to assume the role of stranded astronauts. Using the dilapidated technologies
of previous inhabitants, players attempt to activate a Gauss gun, or coil gun, in an effort to send distress signals back
to Earth. Around this storyline, students encounter a succession of machines that enable them to position electric and
magnetic fields in order to manipulate the speed and direction of charged particles pulsing through the atmosphere.
In this way, player actions connect qualitatively to particle dynamics in order to illuminate underlying properties of
field-particle interactions. These electrostatic principles operate across activities and phenomena in order to facilitate
what diSessa (2000) describes as intuitive understanding. In addition to the range of specific interactive features that
enable students to arrange electric and magnetic fields, we also created additional exaggerated features. For
example, we attached phosphorescent trails behind moving particles in order to illuminate changes in both their

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Zuiker, S. J., Anderson, K., Lee, J. L. H., & Chee, Y. S. (in press). Designing for the epistemological entailments of physics through
game-centered dialogical activity cycles. Paper to be presented at the bi-annual International Conference of the Learning
Sciences.

speed and direction. We also elaborated on the sci-fi narrative by alerting players that astronaut respiration rapidly
depletes oxygen tank levels. This created a fixed time limit that served to focus students on the game space and,
thereby, ensure sufficient time to complete each dialogic activity cycle. Finally, we created a logbook that belonged
to a fictitious astronaut previously stranded on Centauri that features an incomplete and often esoteric record of
events, questions, photographs, and Post-it® notes from her experience on the planet. The logbook and the open
questions that it presented served as a kind of boundary object operating between astronaut and student, Centauri 7
and classroom, and game and discussions.

Game play is complemented by the collaborative meaning-making activities that we characterized above in
terms of a Dialogic Activity Cycle. The curriculum also features a final project in which each small group constructs
a gaming manual that communicates the principles underlying both the particle dynamics and the game as well as
their reflections about the experiences and process necessary to construct the manual. Building such an artifact
challenged small groups to consolidate and generalize their intuitive virtual experience and classroom discussions.
Completing these (pencil and paper) astronaut logs also concretizes each group’s shared experiences relative to the
range of game experiences and provides an accountability structure required by the school.

Data Sources
During classroom sessions, we simultaneously supported the curricular enactment, conducted informal in-
situ interviews, collected written artifacts, generated observational field notes, video-recorded two student groups,
and debriefed with Mr. Ong after lessons. Before and after the curriculum we administered pre-post assessments of
physics understandings and conducted focus group discussions. Our learning measure featured a subset of eight
multiple-choice items adapted from the Force Concept Inventory (Hestenes, Wells, & Swackhammar, 1992), which
assesses relevant Newtonian concepts against commonsense beliefs.

Data Analysis
The research team met periodically during the implementation to summarize field notes and observations.
We subsequently incorporated the range of data above with our initial impressions to comprise methodic naturalistic
inquiry (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). To this end, we progressively developed interpretations of the data while
simultaneously engaging in reflexive practices that illuminate and temper our subjectivities (e.g., negative case
analysis). We focus on two groups in the same class as it provides contrasting degrees of participation and discourse.
In this sense, the cases represent our efforts to feature maximum variation of the curricular enactment in order to
better understand the plausibility of our design together with a qualified understanding of challenges and tensions
that remain. We reviewed the notes in each individual’s log and well as group presentation charts and final projects
in order to inform our review of the groups’ recorded activities. Consistent with interactional analysis (Jordan &
Henderson, 1995), we initially generated content logs for each small group. We then met to discuss the documented
group interactions with respect to our research questions and returned to the data to transcribe a subset of roughly
fifty episodes across cycles of dialogic activity. Our aim in this process was to understand trajectories of
participation across activities in order to trace how students appropriated intuitive understandings of gaming
phenomena in group and whole-class discussions as well as how these achievements shaped subsequent cycles. Our
findings in the next section present a paradigmatic series of episodes across one dialogic activity cycle together with
more representative episodes that serve to qualify our successes and communicate some of the tensions surfacing in
our ongoing efforts.

Analysis of Group Trajectories through Game-centered Cycles
We present case studies of two student groups from the same class across the curriculum. The first group
sometimes provided a paradigmatic enactment of the intended curriculum whereas the second group challenged us
more often to re-examine our design efforts to formally anchor serious games to dialogic activity cycles. To begin,
we first determined that students in both classes developed a deeper understanding of the behavior of charged
particles relative to commonsense distractors. A paired t-test of the pre-post learning gains suggests that gains for
both classes were unlikely to have occurred by chance (t(33)=5.0, p<0.00). This measure provides a general sense of
class-wide performance. While both groups that we consider here performed relatively well, our general descriptions
and analyses of transcribed episodes qualify fundamental differences. We discuss these differences in terms of our
three research questions and interpret them with respect to efforts to refine our designs and to evolve a theory of
game-centered dialogical activity cycles.

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Zuiker, S. J., Anderson, K., Lee, J. L. H., & Chee, Y. S. (in press). Designing for the epistemological entailments of physics through
game-centered dialogical activity cycles. Paper to be presented at the bi-annual International Conference of the Learning
Sciences.

The first group provides a paradigmatic enactment of the curricular intentions in and across cycles of
gaming and reflection. The following descriptions warrant the plausibility of developing serious gaming curricula in
terms of dialogic cycles; however they are not representative of the whole class. The three boys in this group
collaborated productively and often appeared to be gaming seriously. They used Escape from Centauri 7 to address
the implicit physics questions raised in the logbooks, to collaboratively achieve game goals, and, in later cycles, to
link logbook information to game play. In small group discussions, this group methodically prepared for
presentations, working to formalize their experiences before writing or drawing. During whole class debriefings,
they asked meaningful questions of other groups and presented reasonable explanations. In focus group interviews
after the curriculum, one group member explained how a debate during the first debriefing framed subsequent
inquiry during game play. Specifically, the boys in this instance used the game to test whether or not they could use
electric and magnetic fields to stop particles from moving. Moreover, the group was among the four in the class that
completed the game by effectively using the Gauss gun to send a distress signal to Earth. Regardless of the degree of
success, we only claim that it is a transactional achievement between particular individuals and our curricular
design.

We now shift from a descriptive to interpretive analysis of transcribed episodes across one dialogic activity
cycle. The first group’s (Gopal, Zhang, and Seng Chee) enactment of the curriculum illustrates transactional
achievements in terms of the mediating role we intended our design to facilitate. The first excerpt presents an early
episode during the first gaming session. The group is interrogating the game space and, through the language they
use to structure their experience, they also appear to be surfacing physics phenomena.
Z: How do you change this thing? (points at screen)
G: Hmm. (looks at Z’s screen) I have no idea what it is. You have to deflect the field onto the -
oh, NOW I get the point of asking those questions (reference to astronaut logbook). Ey, cool,
definitely cool. Okay, I- that’s how the game works but I’m not very sure right now.
S: I didn’t get it deflected. A bit too much
G: Agree, but I think I found out how the thing works. But I am completely messed up. Yeah, I
am deflecting it in a wrong direction completely.
S: I’m deflecting it in the correct direction but a bit too much.
The group uses formal terms like “particles” and “fields” as well as game space indexicals that vaguely reference
features with “this” and “it.” In this way, the group works to understand the (physics) principles underlying the
changes they effect or, as Gopal says, “how the game works.” However, their language remains largely
indeterminate to non-players. Only Gopal’s advice—“you have to deflect the field”—suggests a functional
understanding, albeit an inverted one in which particles act on fields. The running narrative in this transcript
communicates the group’s engaged participation and coordinated efforts to understand the dynamic relations
between particles and fields. It is these kinds of shared gaming experiences that provide a productive foundation for
subsequent discussions and debriefings beyond the game space. To this end, the group’s discussion during the same
cycle considers phosphorescent trails that particles emit, illustrating their ongoing efforts to make sense of the game.
G: (explaining to S) The length of the trail changes {…} the distance traveled by the particle away
from the point in the field {…} so if it moves faster, the trail will be longer. The first time I
didn’t know what to do {…} maximum backwards, it bounced off and went backwards
(gestures right then left).
Z: Mine was a curve (gestures a curving path)
G: Yes, same, was a curve. Backwards. Goes slightly in, moves around and “zing” (gestures an
about-turn).
In contrast to the basic terminology that the group used during game play, Gopal and Zhang specifically explain the
significance of particle trails in terms of speed. Gopal also comments on his initial puzzlement during game play.
While this discussion clearly draws upon game features and prior game play to make meaning, the students
accompany several descriptions with hand gestures. In light of the transition from gaming experiences to classroom
reflection, this episode highlights a converging understanding in more formal descriptions that the students
punctuate with gestures and, in contrast to game play, without game space indexicals. As a final example of the
group’s trajectory through one activity cycle, we briefly elaborate on their involvement in a debate during the
aforementioned whole class debriefing. The group challenged another’s assertions that particle trails represented
wavelength and intervals between each particle represented frequency. Instead, they proposed that the length of
particle trails represent speed. The ensuing whole-class debate arrived at the question of whether or not a field can
“stop particles in their tracks entirely.” This debate, in turn, shaped subsequent cycles of game play as the group
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