What is Conceptually-Integrated Game

The design of digital objects and representations in digital games is highly consequential for learning. Digital objects in learning games provide opportunities to scaffold teacher and student learning toward deeper epistemological understanding of the concepts they represent, but objects and representations can also be interpreted in a manner that misrepresents the concepts in whose place they stand. For the current study, one teacher was observed using the SURGE learning environment. During the study, the teacher combined the learning environment with direct instruction to teach Newton's laws of force and motion. Findings highlight the importance of designs that (a) explicitly model the meaning of the representations in the learning environment, (b) provide opportunities for teachers and students to interact with the full range of the properties of the representational object, and (c) incentivize players to utilize representations in the environment to their full extent, such that the learning environment repeatedly reinforces the core concepts of the representation.