From playing a game to solving an equation

Although the potential of digital games as instructional resources is well known, facilitating deeper learning from games is acknowledged to be a considerable challenge. This paper argues that examining transfer from the realm of a digital game to the realm of a discipline as a case of analogical reasoning can be productive when trying to understand and later design scaffolds that connect the knowledge representations embedded in games to formal disciplinary knowledge representations used at school. This claim is supported through (1) an analysis of the design of a multiplatform commercial educational game Dragon Box 5+, aimed at teaching children to solve algebraic equations; and (2) tracking the experiences of several players. The transfer from procedures in the game to algebraic procedures is explored as a case of analogical reasoning, specifically addressing central sub-processes such as retrieval, mapping, evaluation of inferences, and the role of prior knowledge in these processes.