The behavior of circuits requires students to make a significant leap from thinking about charge interactions as forces to reasoning through interactions with energy. Students must reconstruct their mental models of charge interactions to include energy, an already complex and novel idea for first-year physics students. To scaffold this introduction, I framed the learning experience around gravitational potential energy, which is a concept students are familiar with. Having students first articulate what they remembered about gravitational potential energy and then include electrostatics was intrinsically hermeneutical. The online simulations and inquiry activity I provided continually asked students to consider their understanding of energy, utilize this to make sense of electrostatic energy, and then see how this assimilation alters their understanding of energy conservation as a whole. Their observations and reflections also introduce the concept of electric potential, a new explanation for the motion of charges that can be experimentally measured during the activity. Incorporating the fact that electric potential differences move charge into their mental models, students’ explanations slowly transitioned away from force interactions, and questions arose from the students about which model—force or energy—was better suited for different phenomena.