This resource is a section from the book Mathematics in Physics Education, released in 2019 by Springer International Publishing. For physicists, equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and not, working together and inextricably linked. By blending mathematical forms and physical intuition, physicists breathe meaning into the equations they use, and this process is fundamental to what it means for an expert to understand something. In contrast, in physics class, novice students often treat mathematics as only a calculational tool, isolating it from their rich knowledge of the physical world. We are interested in cases where students break that pattern by reading, manipulating, and building equations meaningfully rather than purely formally. To find examples of this and explore the diversity of ways students combine formal and intuitive resources, we conducted problem-solving interviews with students in an introductory physics for life sciences class. During the interviews, students' reasoning strategies were scaffolded to elicit both formal and intuitive reasoning. We used the analytic framework of epistemic games to model how students used the strategies and how they accessed problem-solving resources, and we present evidence that novice students using these strategies accessed more expert-like conceptual systems than those typically described in problem-solving literature.

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