Educational games have the potential to be innovative forms of
learning assessment, by allowing us to not just study their
knowledge but the process that takes students to that knowledge.
This paper examines the mediating role of players’ moves in
digital games on changes in their pre-post classroom measures of
implicit science learning. We applied automated detectors of
strategic moves, built and validated from game log data combined
with coded videos of gameplay of 69 students, to a new and larger
sample of gameplay data. These data were collected as part of
national implementation study of the physical science game,
Impulse. This study compared 213 students in 21 classrooms that
only played the game and 180 students in 18 classrooms in where
the players’ teacher used game examples to bridge the implicit
science learning in the game with explicit science content covered
in class. We analyzed how learning outcomes between conditions
were associated with six strategic moves students made during
gameplay. Three of the strategic moves observed are consistent
with an implicit understanding of Newton’s First Law, the other
three strategic moves were not. Path analyses suggest the
mediating role of strategic moves on students’ implicit science
learning is different between the two conditions.