Lower secondary school students’ conversations when constructing representations of plate boundaries in Minecraft

This article explores students’ (13 y) conversations when they construct representations of plate boun - daries in the digital gaming environment of Minecraft Education. It also investigates how the spatial af - fordance of Minecraft Education may support students’ meaning making of the theory of plate tectonics. Video data of classroom activities with Minecraft Education was collected with head cameras. Analysis of the data shows that students overall used everyday language during the activity of constructing plate boundaries. The study suggests i.) a need for more teacher-centeredness and structured scaffolding of scientific language during small group work in Minecraft, and ii.) a need to increase the spatial extent in Minecraft Education to include both the subsurface and more regional scales of resolution.


INTRODUCTION
Today, we live in a world where the experience of the physical world is transformed through digital lenses, evident by VR-technology, smart-devices, and gaming technologies.Naturally, the digital era also affects the aims and values in general education, as well as advancing the learning environments to include the digital space alongside the analogue.Digital competence is one of five basic skills in general education in Norway (NDET, 2019 a), indicating that teachers are expected to enhance the digital aspect of their teaching.The expectation of implementing the digital (units, artifacts, and facilities) in science classrooms calls for research concerning the pedagogical affordances provided by tremendously varied, and ever-evolving digital environments.As a concept, affordance is recognized as the possibilities and constraints of the human environment, and in this case, Minecraft Education (Aagaard & Lund, 2019).The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training emphasizes the need for awareness and critical judgement in teachers' choice of learning environments in response to the framework for teachers' digital competence (NDET, 2021).However, the research revolving these matters is still limited.

20(1), 2024
In the curriculum for natural science in Norway, the theory of plate tectonics involves one of the competence aims for lower secondary school (NDET, 2019 b).The theory comprises the whole Earth, and its spatial relationships is a key factor in understanding the system with earthquakes, formation and recycling of crust with volcanoes and subduction, and the distribution of mountains, oceans and continents.There is limited research on instructional approaches concerning plate tectonics, and only a handful of studies involve the construction of plate boundaries (Gobert & Clement, 1999;Mills, Tomas & Lewthwaite, 2019;Nichols, Gillies & Hedberg, 2015).In science classrooms, students' meaning making is largely facilitated by practicing the social language of science (Mortimer & Scott, 2003).However, meaning making also includes students' interpretation and construction of multiple representations of a concept, through different modes such as speech, writing, drawing or use of body language through gestures (Bezemer & Kress, 2020;De Silva Joyce & Feez, 2018;Knain, Fredlund, Furberg, Remmen & Ødegaard, 2017).
Regarding learning environments enabling the construction of multimodal representations, Timmis et al., (2016) point out that immersive and game-based environments are often highlighted when discussing the potential of digital technologies for student active learning.With a rapid increase in digital learning environments and an expectation from stakeholders to increase the degree of digital technologies in education, science teachers must identify appropriate learning environments supporting students' meaning making (NDET, 2021).Using digital gaming-environments for learning can motivate students and stimulate student critical thinking and also, visualize the abstractness of phenomena in science (Nkadimeng & Ankiewicz, 2022).
Consequently, to increase the amount of research on student active learning in digital environments for plate tectonics, this study investigates lower secondary school students' small group-conversations during an activity where they construct representations of plate boundaries in Minecraft.Previous studies indicate that Minecraft holds potential for game-based teaching and learning (Baek, Min & Yun, 2020).However, no studies have been published investigating the appropriateness of Minecraft with respect to geological processes associated with plate tectonics.In a previous study about students' representations of plate tectonics, Mills et al., (2019) found that students' ideas developed through 'teachable moments', where dialogic teacher-student and student-student exchanges promoted the students' understanding.Further research on students' small group interactions and scientific dialogue is needed to shed more light on how to improve students' meaning making when using digital learning environments.
The two research questions in this study are: RQ1: What characterizes students' conversations when they construct representations of plate boundaries in Minecraft?RQ2: What affordances are associated with representing plate tectonics in Minecraft?
Design based research (DBR) serves as methodology for this study where the aim is to develop design principles for teaching set in real educational contexts (Juuti & Lavonen, 2012).The methodology is recognized by multiple sets of iterations, analysis, and redesign of instructional approaches.This article reports on the first iteration of the developed instructional approach, discusses findings and implications for the teaching design of the next iteration.Two science teachers participated in designing the teaching unit, and chose Minecraft as a digital environment for the construction of visual representations, due to its motivating characteristics as a gaming-world, and its potential to support student active learning.Minecraft as an educational tool and digital game based learning environment has actually shown to increase students' interest of Earth science (Pusey & Pusey, 2015).In this study, most of the students were acquainted with Minecraft, and the teachers had some experience with the program from a CPD-meeting about Minecraft arranged by the municipality, a significant factor contributing to their choice of software.
The theoretical perspectives relevant for this study are described in the continuing section, followed by a description of the study's context, design and analytical approach.

Minecraft as learning environment in geoscience education
According to Aagard and Lund (2019) the aspect of interaction between humans and digital technologies as artifacts, is what provides affordance for learning in a given situation.Here, the notion of artifact refers to something more than a tool, rather something cultural historical with the possibility to transform practice and activities, in addition to the person interacting with the artifact (Aagaard & Lund, 2019).As a digital learning environment, Minecraft Education can be characterized as an artifact, in which students engage and interact, constructing environments and performing actions.
Concepts and theories in science are characterized by a large variety of different measures or sizes.
Processes and components range from electrons in physics and chemistry, unseen to the eye, to the size of continents in geology, and to light years in astronomy.Hence, learning science challenges the learners' ability to create mental representations of these concepts and how they are related to the learner's everyday experience of the world (1:1 scale).The potential of Minecraft as an environment for learning about concepts within geoscience is treated in a handful of studies.Minecraft is a relative popular digital gaming environment encompassing the dimensions of space, and offers possibilities for science teaching and learning (Megan & Grant, 2015).Although not evidence-based, Ellison and Evans (2016) argue Minecraft entail the following affordances: problem solving, critical thinking and collaboration.
Pusey and Pusey (2015) did a survey investigating the use of Minecraft as educational tool for teaching about topics focusing on minerals, sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks, and the rock cycle with 8 th grade students from two schools in Australia.The design and implementation of the teaching unit did not include the large-scale formation processes describing how rocks are produced.Instead, the teaching unit included the activities of finding and detecting different rock types within the depths in which they are formed, locating fossils and determine their relative age (Pusey & Pusey, 2015).Baek, Min, and Yun (2020) reviewed educational studies involving Minecraft and found that challenges with using Minecraft in the classroom include the lack of focused learning objectives, inflexible curriculum, and no previous gaming skills.According to the authors, successful integration of Minecraft into the teaching and learning environments requires teacher-centeredness versus learner-centeredness (Baek et al., 2020).Nkadimeng and Ankiewicz (2022) investigated how Minecraft Education as a game-based learning (GBL) tool provide affordances for learning about the structure of atoms.They found indication of that Minecraft Education holds some affordance with respect to making atomic structures seem less abstract to students, and that students were challenged to think critically.However, it was also evident that some of the activities in the intervention did not promote deep learning (Nkadimeng & Ankiewicz, 2022).

Multimodal learning in science
Meaning making as a process includes a range of modes such as gestures, verbal language, drawings, artefacts, and technologies.However, language, spoken or written, constitutes a major part of how we learn (Jewitt, 2006).Learning is thus multimodal, and the way we interact with various meaning making modes, can be visual, actional or linguistic (Jewitt, Kress, Ogborn, & Tsatsarelis, 2001).Kress, Selander, Säljö and Wulf (2021) refer to modes as sets of socially organized semiotic resources that are relevant to use in meaning construction.A study by Wilson and Bradbury (2016) highlights that students' meaning making is enhanced when they engage in multiple modes (drawing and writing in this case) to represent a phenomenon, since it stimulates the synthesizing of function and structures of objects in the students' representations.However, Prain and Waldrip (2006) discovered challenges faced by teachers when students engage with multimodal and multiple representations of science concepts, processes, and results.These challenges are i.) incorporating and processing students' interpretations of former experiences to new investigations in the classroom, ii) re-representation of understanding in 3D, 2D and verbal modes, including relevant concepts or processes, and iii) including simultaneously the practices and functions of signs used in each representational system.Simi-

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[89] 20(1), 2024 larly, Ainsworth (2006) claims, a student needs to understand each single representation experienced during instruction, to further construct and use multiple representations of a given concept.

Classroom conversations in science
Science talk is one of the major activities of doing science (Osborne, 2014), and is closely related to teaching and learning science, including the nature of science (Lemke, 1990;Mortimer et al., 2003).
Regarding meaning making, Lemke (1990) outlines how students need to learn the semantics of scientific words; "To get the meaning of the whole, you need to know more than the meaning of each word: you need to know the relations of meaning between different words."p. 27.According to Wellington and Osborne (2001), in order to understand a new concept, students need to get the chance to talk, think about and use the proper words associated with a concept.Science teaching should thus provide possibilities for students' progression from using everyday language to practicing more scientific meaning of words, such as using the word "plate" in the appropriate context of plate tectonic theory (Wellington & Osborne, 2001).
Understanding talk and multimodal communication in the science classroom is of great importance, to improve students' meaning making processes in science (Ødegaard, Arnesen, & Klette, 2016).
Classroom interactions between teacher and students have been widely studied, and scholars have argued the need for teachers to increase the amount of student ideas in the classroom discourse, in order to enhance student scientific reasoning (Mortimer & Scott, 2003;Sandoval, Kawasaki, & Clark, 2020).Classroom communication can be characterized in a number of ways.Mortimer & Scott (2003) provided a framework for describing the content of classroom interaction between teacher and students.The distinction between everyday language and scientific language spoken by a teacher or the students may have a significant impact on learning.A teacher may for instance introduce a new concept by using everyday language to describe its meaning, the semantics between the words.To illustrate with an example from plate tectonics, where the concept of "constructive plate margins" (scientific language) can be translated to everyday language as "crustal plates moving apart".Everyday language may also trigger student misconceptions when a concept entails different meanings in everyday life and in science.Students should further be given opportunities to practice using everyday language to learn how to use scientific language (Ødegaard, Arnesen, & Klette, 2016).
Central features of science language can be characterized as description, explanation, and generalization of science concepts (Mortimer & Scott 2003).Description relates to how the social language of science is practiced by either teacher or students.It corresponds to the communicated characteristics regarding a system, object, or phenomenon in terms of movement or components, for instance the relationship between mountain chains and plate boundaries in plate tectonics.Explanation refers to using a theoretical model when accounting for a phenomenon, for instance relating earthquakes to the theory of plate tectonics.Generalization means when a description is independent in any given situation, e.g. a rock containing fossils is a sedimentary rock (Mortimer & Scott, 2003).In the science classroom, communication can be characterized with the notion of a communicative approach, ranging from dialogic to authoritative, in terms of how the talk excludes or invites participants to join the conversation (Mortimer & Scott, 2003).However, this approach is mainly used to characterize a teachers' interaction with students.
In science education, classroom dialogue led by the teacher is the most common used strategy for supporting students' learning.Ødegaard et al., (2016) analyzed the use of language in science lessons and found that the amount of scientific talk including descriptions, explanations and generalizations of science content constitutes less than 20% (Ødegaard et al., 2016).There was also a high amount of procedural talk compared to scientific dialogue, between teacher and students during group work.This means that students' experiences from group work can to a greater extent be incorporated in the classroom discourse, to enhance learning of content knowledge.The authors also found that teachers did not facilitate for situations where students could practice using scientific language in a systematic manner.There was little support "bridging" students' talk from everyday to scientific talk, hence students missed opportunities to enhance their understanding (Ødegaard et al., 2016).

METHODS Context
The new science curriculum in general education in Norway focuses on scientific practices such as modelling and digital competence (NDET, 2019 b).In addition, digital skills represent a core element in the Norwegian curriculum, while principles of plate tectonics are one of the aims in science competence.Hence, a teaching activity where students construct representations of plate boundaries in the computer game Minecraft was designed and implemented in a lower secondary school class in Norway.Based on the participating teachers' choice, the software was chosen as a digital environment for students' construction of representations.

The participants
This study focuses on eight 13 years old students in a lower secondary school class of 25 students (grade 8 th ) in Norway.Two classroom teachers (science teacher and geography teacher) with 15-and 30-years' experience, respectively were also participating in the study.Both teachers are generalists who teach several subjects.Neither has formal background from science.The school is situated in rural parts of South-east Norway, and all participating students were Norwegian speaking.The participating students (6 girls and 3 boys).The author in collaboration with the teachers developed and implemented a curriculum unit using design-based research (DBR).The students had 1:1 iPads and were familiar with the Minecraft-environment.

Ethical considerations
According to Kirk (2007) there are three main ethical challenges related to qualitative research with children: informed consent, confidentiality and power relations.To accommodate ethical issues, the study was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data.Both teachers and the students' parents had given consent to participate in the project before the time of data collection.The participants were informed both written and verbally that they could withdraw from the study at any point, and that their names were given pseudonyms.The findings from this study are not generalizable due to the limited number of participants but contribute to the field as a small-scale case study.Regarding the analytical approach used for assessing visual affordance in Minecraft with respects to plate tectonics, other frameworks may provide different findings.

Methodology and data collection
Head mounted cameras (brand: Contour 2) on students captured video material from the implementation of the teaching unit including the activity in Minecraft.The students had worked in Minecraft with the task for 30 minutes before video recording started, due to misunderstanding between teacher and researcher.The author was present during the lessons (apart from 30 minutes in the above case) taking field notes and monitoring the video collection.Within the field of research approaches, DBR, similar to educational design research has since the 1990's become increasingly employed in empirical educational research (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012;Edelson, 2002).In the pursuit of developing insight into students' learning processes or developing design for learning, the approach engages researchers in the direct improvement of educational practice (Edelson, 2002).Methodological features of DBR are characterized by being situated in a real educational context, focusing on design and testing of an intervention.The use of mixed methods is common to provide rich data, involving multiple iterations with analysis and refinement of the design and finally, a partnership between researchers and participants (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012).

Teaching design and learning objectives
The teaching design was based on the following competence aim from the Norwegian science curriculum for 10 th grade: "use the plate tectonics theory to explain the earth's development over time and give examples of observations that support the theory" (NDET, 2019 b).The teaching design consisted of five main learning activities.The first activity was an introduction to plate tectonics and plate boundaries with the online learning module at viten.no.This was followed by rock observation

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[91] 20(1), 2024 (three main groups of rocks), and rock sampling from the local environment.Back in the classroom, students analyzed the rocks and inferred them to the historic type of plate boundary of the area.Furthermore, students modelled the plate boundary in the software Minecraft, without any assessment criteria or teacher guidance.The students did not include advanced programming-attributes in their Minecraft-worlds, due to time limitations and the students' skill level in Minecraft.Two student groups consisting of four students cooperated in the same Minecraft-world, building two models of constructive plate boundaries.The students had approximately 1,5 hours available for the construction of the representation in Minecraft.
Learning objectives of the teaching design was divided into three conceptual topics, based on the learning module about plate tectonics at viten.no (first edition), as well as instruction regarding rock formation.The three conceptual topics are volcanoes and their origin, tectonic plates and boundaries and igneous rock identification.The following elaborates the content knowledge associated with each topic: • Volcanoes and their origin:

Analytical approach and frameworks
Video recordings of the science lessons with Minecraft were first viewed by the author to get an overview of the data.For RQ1 (students' conversations when representing in Minecraft), the aim was to identify students' verbal interactions and characterize these using an analytical framework modified from Mortimer & Scott (2003) and Ødegaard et al., (2016), illustrated in Table 1.This framework is mainly oriented towards classroom discourse led by the teacher, where the categories of communicative approach and patterns of discourse are greatly influenced by the teachers' choices.In the current analysis, three categories in the framework are operationalized with respects to the interaction occurring in the student groups, where there was little or no interference with the teachers.The main categories are social language, scientific content and feature of dialogue.The coding scheme was developed based on a first overview of the video data, and further inspired by the codes applied in the study of Ødegaard et al., 2016.The author then coded the video data according to the coding scheme.
Lower secondary school students' conversations [92] 20(1), 2024 A description or explanation is unconditional of the situation

Student commenting
Student takes initiative to raise a topic or needs assistance to solve something

Student raising awareness towards something
The following provides a description and operationalization of the specific codes used for analysis.
For the category of content, the "everyday talk" code represented student talk where none of the concepts related to plate tectonics, were included.As a component of everyday talk, the codes gamerelated talk and procedural talk was recognized.Game-related talk occurred as incidents when the students were engaged with extracurricular actions in the Minecraft world.To exemplify when a student stopped constructing a plate boundary and started building a house.Procedural talk refers to how students expressed ideas regarding the practical task of constructing the plate boundary, for instance where to place the boundary and distribution of work tasks.The code "scientific talk" represented a conversation including elements from the conceptual topics, e.g., volcanoes and their origin.
In the category "scientific content", student talk was categorized either as a conceptual description, explanation, or generalization of scientific content, relative to plate tectonics theory.
For RQ2 (affordances for representing plate tectonics in Minecraft), photos of students' digital representations of plate boundaries were collected for analysis, using an analytical framework for drawings, developed by Tang et al., (2019).The concept of affordance in this study is thus limited to the spatial affordance of the learning environment, in terms of representing processes associated with plate tectonics.The framework, tested in physics and chemistry lessons, is relevant for scientists and teachers when it comes to recognizing key conceptual features and meanings (Tang et al., 2019).It provides a metalanguage for scaffolding and addressing student reasoning while learning with representations.One single representation may contain several different categories and relationships, indicating a students' ideas.The framework is based on the premise that all semiotic systems contain meaning in three forms: presentational, orientational and organizational.Tang et al., (2019) claim that the way learners select semiotic resources is based on choices, that depends on the affordances of the semiotic systems, and the interest of the user.Utilizing the framework on students' visual representations can provide knowledge regarding how students construct representations, including their understanding of relationships between objects (Tang et al., 2019).Seven main categories constitute the framework (Table 2), however, in this study, the main categories association, perspective (including dimension), spatial and movement were chosen for identification and analysis.

Textual contextualization
Based on Tang et al., (2019), the following describes the selected categories of the framework.Regarding presentational meaning, the main categories association, spatial and movement is included in the analysis.Association means how two or more visual objects are joined together, whereas the category spatial includes how objects are positioned, spaced, distributed, sized, scaled, or aligned.Movement can be present in drawings in the sense of arrows or lines.Orientational meaning regards how drawings include different perspective and alignment of objects, such as perpendicular alignment, parallel alignment, or left-right positioning of objects.Organizational meaning includes the category connective, focusing on the interplay between smaller elements of a larger drawing expressing logical relationships.Textual contextualization refers to how the drawer includes labels, legends, or captions to express conceptual features (Tang et al., 2019).Video footage was also collected from the episodes presented in the result-section of this article, to illustrate the multimodal aspects of the students' dialogue.

RQ1: What characterizes students' conversations when they construct representations of plate boundaries in Minecraft?
Scientific features of student talk during the activity in Minecraft was minimal, occurring less than 1% of the videotaped lessons.Above 99% of the time spent with Minecraft was everyday talk, hence social language was dominant during the activity.None of the codes explanation or generalization was applied on the datasets of group 1 and 2. Students in both groups copied a poster of a constructive plate boundary and constructed a similar representation.However, they did not relate their representations to the physical components of the plate boundary (other than the occurrence of magma), nor talk about characteristics such as crust, earthquakes, depths or melting.Most of the time spent working in Minecraft was not relevant to learning about plate tectonics but consisted in building boundaries with no reference to the thematic pattern of relevant processes associated with plate tectonics.There were no student-teacher conversations other than procedural talk.Most of the time, students discussed sizes of volcanoes and issues concerning the selection of appropriate building blocks.They also spent a lot of time removing volcanoes, talking about programming codes in Minecraft, and discussed how to add water or magma to the representations.Members of both groups misinterpreted the activity and made several types of plate boundaries, including a transform plate boundary (group 2) and a destructive boundary (group 1).Group 2 made several free-standing volcanos on the earths' surface and did not include the appearance of related midoceanic ridges.
The following episodes from group 1 and group 2 were selected based on the scientific features students expressed verbally and through their representations, e.g., volcanoes and rock types.
Group 1 consisted of Eric, Lars, Anna and Mia who worked in the same Minecraft-world.Eric and Lars sat together and made a plate boundary using iPads, while Anna and Mia sat together constructing a Lower secondary school students' conversations [94] 20(1), 2024 plate boundary on their own, beside the boys.Overall, there were few (>2) episodes in group 1 where students discussed plate boundaries and relationships, and most of the talk focused on the gaming and the students' previous gaming experiences with Minecraft.The following excerpt (Table 3) illustrates conceptual dialogue between Eric, Lars Mia and Anna on the topic of how volcanoes originate.In the next episode, episode 2, group 1 is having a dialogue about whether they should compete or not when constructing a volcano (Table 4).

Julie Guttormsen
[95] 20(1), 2024 Anne's iPad-screen, seeing her co-player Mia in the Minecraft-world, in front of the representation of a constructive plate boundary.In addition to the lava (in orange color) there is also water (in blue) present on the surface Seen in episode 2, the students do not relate further concepts from the learning objectives to the construction of volcanoes, and their dialogue expresses that there was plenty of time on working with the representations.Lars used the everyday word "base" referring to the bottom of the volcano, but could instead have used the scientific word volcanic mountain or magma chamber.
In the following episode with group 1, Eric and Anna shares a dialogue regarding the appearance and provenance of the representation constructed by Eric and Lars.A few geological concepts, including mountains and sideways plate motion are included (Table 5).Teacher: it is ten minutes left of the activity "A tower of rocks" constructed by Lars and Eric in group 1.
Lower secondary school students' conversations [96] 20(1), 2024 In episode 3, Anna and Mia are confused regarding Eric and Lars' representations of what appears to be a mountain.Eric tries to explain to Anna that transform plate boundaries (sideway plate movement) produces mountains however, this is erroneous.Anna questions Erics' answer and is left unknowing.The dialogue terminates when the teacher reminds the class that they are finishing in ten minutes.The representation of the mountain constructed by Lars and Eric also includes magma, indicated by the image showing video footage from Minecraft.The magma chamber is also located above the ground and not in the subsurface, indicating an erroneous understanding.
Group 2 consisted of Nina, Lisa, Mary and Jane, who also worked together in a Minecraft-world on their individual iPads, developing constructive plate boundaries.The group constructed a series of volcanoes on the surface, and in this episode, Nina and Mary decide on rather creating a big volcano (Table 6).The episode also indicates non-conceptual talk.As shown in the image of the video footage, Mary constructed a volcano-mountain on the base of the earths' surface, not reflecting on its components in the subsurface.

RQ2: What affordances are associated with representing plate tectonics in Minecraft?
Based on analysis of students' visual representations of plate boundaries in Minecraft, the following observations are made, shown in table 7.

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[97] 20(1), 2024 The software enables students to represent geologic objects associated with plate tectonic theory in three dimensions.However, the perspective of the constructed representations involved limitations regarding the profile-view of the plate boundaries, where the plate boundaries are placed on top of the earths' surface.Thus, the aspect of plate boundaries as a natural component of the crust is neglected in the representation.Additionally, the range of the magma chamber in the center of the plate boundary in table 7 is not included, and the relationship between the mantle and melting lithosphere is unclear.Movement was included in the representation as two arrows, pointing in opposite directions at the base of the two dividing plates.
Lower secondary school students' conversations [98] 20(1), 2024 In Table 8, a student has constructed a representation of a transform plate boundary as two adjoining blocks, with arrows pointing in opposite directions.The student used magma underneath the plates, which indicate an erroneous conception, since magma does not occur at transform plate margins.
The arrows indicate relative movement between the plates.The representation does not include any topographic features.

DISCUSSION
The aim of this study was to explore how teaching with student-generated representations in Minecraft offered opportunities for students to talk about plate tectonics, and how the software offers spatial affordance for learning.The two research questions will now be addressed in the following discussion, and the article ends with a short presentation of implications.

RQ1: What characterizes students' conversations when they construct representations of plate boundaries in Minecraft?
The activity in Minecraft where students constructed digital representations of plate boundaries promoted very few episodes of scientific dialogue about the concepts associated with plate tectonics.The features of scientific language involving explanations and generalizations were not present in the data.Although students were given the chance to talk about the characteristics of plate boundaries,

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[99] 20(1), 2024 they did not express having ideas of how volcanoes were connected to different plate boundaries and mantle, or the concept of midoceanic ridges.As reported by Ødegaard et al., (2016), during group work, much of the talk is procedural talk, and teacher support is of great importance to help students transgress from using everyday language to scientific language.The role of the teacher in the Minecraft activity was mainly as an observer, indicated by the few episodes of interference.Indicated by episode 6, the meaning making process regarding transform plate boundaries ended and was left unresolved.If the students had invited their teacher into the conversation, the dialogue may have resulted in meaning making.
Recalling Mills (2019) study, finding that students sophisticated their ideas of plate tectonics through dialogic interaction with their teacher and co-students, episode 3 indicated a potential for students' meaning making regarding the formation of mountains in response to destructive plate boundaries.However, the student refers erroneously to the type of plate boundary causing the mountain-formation.Lemke (1990) refers to how students need to see the relations of meaning between different words, as a network of concepts tied together to make meaning.However, the right words and connections are not evident to the students, at the point of the Minecraft activity.
Indicated by episode 2 and 3, students had sufficient with time to develop their representations in Minecraft, as well as few scaffolds and assessment criteria involved with the assignment.These findings are similar to those of Baek et al. (2020), who argue for teacher-centeredness during work in Minecraft.To better frame the assignment, a class-reflection on what properties that should be included in the representations prior to the activity, could have promoted students' conceptual dialogues and meaning making.Interestingly, the episode analysis shows that students interacted verbally based on their actions and interactions in the software.As in episode 2, group 1 discusses the appropriateness of different rock types, indicating that the available rocks (and lava) in the software are providing the students with a set of choices that they must decide on, to construct representations.This corresponds to the beliefs expressed by Tang et al., (2019) concerning how students engage in multiple modes for meaning making, in this case, resulting in that Mia decides to make a layer of a certain rock type.

RQ2: What affordances are associated with representing plate tectonics in Minecraft?
Affordance signifies the constraints and possibilities of an artifact, and when it comes to the spatial affordance of Minecraft, this study points to a few challenges.The analysis of the representation of a constructive plate boundary show (Table 7) that students were able to represent plate boundaries with several associated components, consisting of different layers, lava, and movement, indicated by arrows.There are however, critical aspects concerning the spatial arrangement of the representations in Minecraft, considering the 1:1 framing of objects, relative to "human-size".With a virtual Minecraft-world without the ability to "zoom out" and look at earth from afar, the global system of plate tectonics is omitted, potentially leading to misconceptions.Hence, students miss the opportunity to relate processes and plate boundaries to geographic areas, a crucial part of the theory, providing observations and evidence supporting the theory.The representations of plate boundaries must now be built at the Earths' surface, and the characteristics of crust and mantle is somehow disrupted with a background landscape.
The findings of this study may align with the reported affordance of Minecraft, in providing less abstraction of atomic structures, reported by Nkadimeng and Ankiewicz (2022).Less abstraction of components of the plate tectonics system may be a positive affordance, however the difficulties in seeing the relationships between components is a constraint.Regarding the conceptual topic of igneous rocks and rock identification, episode 1 illustrates how the available rock-types in Minecraft provided affordance for the students to engage in dialogue regarding the different rocks' properties.This episode corresponds to the findings of Pusey and Pusey (2015), that Minecraft may be advantageous when it comes to learning the nomenclature and formation processes of certain rock types that are not formed through plate tectonic processes and of limited geographic extent.

IMPLICATIONS
The present study indicates a need for researchers in science education to focus more intently on developing pedagogical criteria for assessing digital environments for representation-based learning activities.These criteria can include how a specific scientific theory is related to spatial dimensions (2D, 3D, 4D), the relevance of including movement of objects, and an optimal reference frame.In the following redesign of the teaching unit, attention to teacher scaffolding structures, assessment criteria and learning objectives is critical.Finally, research focusing on exploring teaching scaffolds for representation-based teaching of plate tectonics in digital and analogue contexts is called for.

LIMITATIONS
Since this is a small-scale case study with only nine students, the findings are thus not generalizable to other contexts.Approximately 30 minutes of the start of the Minecraft activity that was not videotaped.
Anne's iPad-screen and representation of a constructive plate boundary in Minecraft In episode 1, students discuss the properties of the different rock types (sandstone, flint stone and soil) according to their appearance regarding what looks "nice" or proper in their representation.The video footage-image in excerpt 1 shows different layers consisting of various rock types and lava (orange-colored) in the center of the two plates.Students have used arrows to indicate the spreading of the two dividing plates.To the right in the image, one can see Annes' hand and her co-player in Minecraft, Mia.
occur at destructive and constructive plate boundaries.At destructive boundaries one plate subducts beneath the other and cause volcanism on the overriding plate.At constructive plate boundaries plates move apart and cause melting and resulting volcanoes produce new oceanic crust and plate material.• Tectonic plates and boundaries: Plate boundaries are identified based on observations of frequent volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.Plates make up earth's crust.Plates can move in three directions relative to one another: sideways, constructive (away from one another) and destructive (towards one another).Mountains form where two continental plates collide, at destructive plate boundaries.• Rock identification: Igneous rocks often have a dotted pattern, representing the mineral grains in the rock.Igneous rocks are often produced at constructive plate margins eg.midoceanic ridges or where two plates collide (destructive plate boundaries).

Table 3 :
Dialogue in group 1 with Eric, Mia, Lars and Anna Lars: you can use flint-stoneMia: where is that?Oh, mine is not… Anna: that is normal rock Eric: that is sandstone Eric: we just took normal rock.I know it's nicer with the other one, but..

Table 4 :
Dialogue in group 1 with Anna, Eric, Lars and Mia

Table 5 :
Conceptual dialogue in group 1 Question Anna: We don't understand what they're doing (talking about Eric and Lars) Mia: I don't understand why you have a tower with rocks Eric: no, it's a mountain Anna: it's not realistic Eric: sideway plate movements creates mountains Anna: It does?It forms a mountain chain?

Table 6 :
Dialogue in group 2 with Nina, Lisa and Mary

Table 7 :
Analysis of student constructed representations in Minecraft, group 1

Concepts Student representation (photo) Analysis of representation
The analysis of the constructed representation of a constructive plate boundary in Minecraft, developed by Anna and Mia in group 1, shows that the spatial accuracy of the plate boundary in contrast to the 1:1 scale in Minecraft, presents a limitation regarding the software.Plate boundaries range in 100's of kilometers in size, and this aspect is challenging to incorporate in the existing software-design of Minecraft.Hence, students do not have the possibilities to represent in a suitable geographical context and to construct the relationships between different plate motions, e.g., formation of subduction, mountains, and oceanic-continental crust.

Table 8 :
Analysis of student constructed representations in Minecraft, group 2