Educational games can be used effectively in the classroom, because exploration and responses to failure in game spaces can afford productive metacognition that better prepares students for future learning (PFL). In our study, we explored how the role of failure-induced metacognitive appraisal and strategy selection while playing a physics game better prepares students for learning from formal content after gameplay. Our results indicate that experiencing failure to prepare students for future learning can elicit more complex and robust mental representations of a complicated science system. However, experiencing failure unto itself isn’t sufficient for improving general conceptual understanding – a good metacognitive response is required. Further investigation identified response to failure with info-seeking, then fixing one’s answer was found significantly related to learning because it entails an appraisal of knowledge gaps, resolving such gaps through info-seeking, and apply newly acquired information to address prior misconceptions.
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