Teaching Scientific Inquiry as a Situated Practice: A Framework for Analyzing and Designing Science Games

In this paper, I ask: ‘Can digital games support the learning of scientific inquiry as a situated practice? If so, how?’ To approach this question, I draw upon feminist, STS, and pragmatist scholarship to develop a framework that can be used to analyze how a learning environment has been designed to teach scientific inquiry, as well as how it can be redesigned to teach inquiry more like a situated practice. To demonstrate the utility of the framework, I employed it as part of a case study to analyze the game The Mystery of Taiga River. Based on this, I recommend general directions for the design of digital games to support the learning of inquiry as a situated practice using the framework.