SURGE: Integrating Vygotsky's spontaneous and instructed concepts in a digital game?

In Thought and Language, Vygotsky discusses the potential for leveraging intuitive understandings from everyday experience ("spontaneous concepts") with "instructed" scientific concepts to build robust understandings. The question remains whether or not the intuitive spontaneous concepts players develop in through computer games can be successfully leveraged into robust instructed concepts in a manner that transfers to academic assessments and across domains recognized as central by the scientific disciplines themselves. This poster presents data from early studies with the SURGE video game, where students demonstrated significant learning across multiple items of a posttest based on the Force Concept Inventory, suggesting that the sequence and structure of the models and representations designed in the SURGE game are effective in changing how students think about the formal instructed concepts. However, care must be taken to ensure that the ideas that students take away from the game are the ones intended.