Embracing the Game-Like Character of Science and Engineering Activities: A Perspective to Guide Teachers’ Instructional Decisions

ABSTRACT Recent science education reforms emphasize the goal of developing students’ science and engineering practices. To foreground those practices during science instruction, teachers need conceptual tools to guide their instructional decision-making. In this conceptual paper, I propose that thinking about science and engineering activities as educative games provides a useful model for designing productive educational experiences. Central to this argument is a recognition of the ways that games allow learners to experience and cultivate new forms of agency—including those aligned with the practice of science and engineering. When immersed in a game, a student/player pursues clearly defined goals using a limited set of available actions, and in doing so they act out and experience a form of agency that they might not otherwise have been able to access. Viewed in this way, science and engineering activities can be analyzed and evaluated with respect to the forms of agency that they cultivate in students, including the extent to which those forms of agency are consistent with those of science and engineering. In addition to presenting this way of thinking about science and engineering activities, this paper proposes a practical model to assist teachers in analyzing and designing science and engineering learning activities.