This paper describes the design and implementation of a prototype game, FormulaT Racing. FormulaT Racing is designed to be consistent with youth gaming culture while providing a thinking space for connecting intuitive notions of motion to everyday and formal representations of kinematics. A study with five children (ages 7-13) revealed players engage with novel representations and construction tools in the game to develop complex computational strategies. We contend that the intuitive controls, alternate representations, and construction tools included in FormulaT Racing encourage players to consider the track as a collection of functional units—units of action made up of both track features and corresponding velocity changes— leading to an alternate encoding of embedded kinematic content.
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