Telescope to Tablet

Undergraduate students enrolled in astronomy classes often seek to satisfy curiosities about outer space and fulfill a distribution requirement. However, they are rarely prepared to employ the mathematical thinking that is a natural part of the discipline. As a result, astronomy professors are challenged with communicating quantitatively laden subject matter in ways appropriate to their students and context. At Play in the Cosmos is an educational game designed to engage non-science majors by piquing their interest in our modern understanding of the Solar System, Stars, Galaxies and the Universe. It seeks to address this tension between qualitative and quantitative understandings, so that students begin with qualitative intuitions that are then formalized through quantitative representations (see Forbus, 2011). This paper provides a preliminary roadmap to how user feedback contributed to the design process.