This workshop will introduce attendees to a distinctive approach to building games to support middle-grades science learning. This IES-funded project is creating Nintendo DSi games that combine familiar casual game genres, high quality production and careful instructional design. The games are played by students prior to instruction as homework or during other non-instructional time, and stimulate students to develop shared, novel visualizations of abstract phenomenon. Teachers are then supported in using that common visualization as an anchor for analogical thinking about counter-intuitive scientific concepts that are often the subject of scientific misconceptions. Attendees will be introduced to the project approach, and invited to play one of the games, which uses a Pokémon-style battle paradigm to introduce concepts about randomness and dominance that are fundamental to understanding genetic heredity, The session will include time to provide feedback and discuss the game approach with the developers and designers of the games.
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