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This study investigates how pre-service teachers engage with spatial scale reasoning through epistemic games - structured approaches to scientific inquiry and problem-solving. Three primary school pre-service teachers in their third year participated in an activity requiring them to arrange and explain the relative sizes of objects ranging from subatomic particles to astronomical bodies. Through qualitative analysis, we identified three major themes of epistemic games: Cognitive anchoring (using objects, numbers, or experiences as reference points), Object relatedness (understanding relationships through analogy, nestedness, and interaction), and Perspectives (considering contextual and representational viewpoints). While the pre-service teachers employed similar epistemic games as science experts from our previous research, they demonstrated unique engagement through their pedagogical expertise, particularly in considering contextual perspectives. However, the pre-service teachers made more errors than experts, especially when dealing with microscopic objects, despite using similar reasoning strategies. This suggests that the effectiveness of epistemic games depends on underlying conceptual knowledge. The findings have implications for how we prepare teachers to support spatial thinking development in students and highlight the importance of both strategic reasoning and accurate conceptual frameworks in spatial scale understanding.

Our project investigate how pre-service teachers and science experts (space physicists, chemists and biologists) engage with spatial scale reasoning through epistemic games - structured approaches to scientific inquiry and problem-solving. Spatial thinking is foundational to STEM success, yet understanding scales beyond direct human experience remains challenging for many learners (Tretter et al. 2006; Eriksson et al. 2014).Our studies involve four groups: primary school pre-service teachers, chemists, biologists and space physicists. Each group participates in a four-part game-based activity: arranging large astronomical objects by size, adding a human figure for scale reference, repeating the process with microscopic objects, and explaining their reasoning to a novice. Video recordings were analyzed using thematic analysis.We identified three major themes of epistemic games: Cognitive Anchoring, Object Relatedness, and Perspectives.While pre-service teachers employed similar epistemic games as science experts, they demonstrated unique engagement through pedagogical expertise, particularly in contextual perspectives. However, they made more errors with microscopic objects despite using similar reasoning strategies. This suggests that while epistemic games provide valuable reasoning tools, their effectiveness depends on underlying conceptual knowledge.Our findings have implications for teacher preparation programs and science programs, highlighting the need to strengthen both conceptual frameworks and strategic reasoning about spatial scales. This research contributes to understanding how future astronomy and science educators develop the spatial thinking skills that research has established as critical predictors of STEM success and scientific literacy in contexts ranging from the smallest to the largest structures known.