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Wednesday 7th February 2007 1:47 pm

Barab: Quest Atlantis—A 21st Century Curriculum

Much like eating one’s vegetables before getting dessert,
schoolwork is too often treated as a chore rather than reward.

Learning is one of the most natural acts in which a child can engage. Developmentally, young children are born with a propensity to decipher the world around them, make sense of sights and sounds, and learn complex language skills. As children progress to more formal skills, such as recognizing letters and reading, they typically do not view learning these arbitrary symbols as work, but rather approach it as play. In elementary school, a different attitude towards learning regularly emerges; school-based learning is often something that must be done before a child is allowed to go out and play-an activity distinct from play and explicitly labeled ‘work’ (schoolwork, homework). Much like eating one’s vegetables before getting dessert, schoolwork becomes a chore rather than reward. What causes this shift? How does school learning become tinged with a negative connotation? What occurs to shift the perspective from ‘learning as play’ to ‘learning as work’?  Is it possible to reconnect the two and do so even in the context of schools?

It is exactly this problem that we are seeking to understand in our grant work. Quest Atlantis (QA) is a learning and teaching project that uses a 3D multi-user environment to immerse children, ages 9-12, in educational tasks. Building on strategies from online role-playing games, QA combines strategies used in the commercial gaming environment with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. It allows users to travel to virtual places to perform educational activities (known as Quests), talk with other users and mentors, and build virtual personae. A Quest is an engaging curricular task designed to be entertaining yet educational.  Quest Atlantis is structured around seven Social Commitments that we have identified as being important to fostering engaged citizenship.

The core elements of QA are 1) a 3-D multi-user virtual environment (MUVE), 2) learning Quests and unit plans, 3) a storyline, presented through an introductory video as well as a novella and a comic book, that involves a mythical Council and a set of social commitments, and 4) a globally-distributed community of participants. QA was designed to foster inter-subjective experience through structuring interactions that result in children realizing that there are issues in the world upon which they can take action. At the core of QA is the narrative about Atlantis, a world in trouble in the hands of misguided leaders. Participation in QA entails a personal and shared engagement with that narrative, as kids are asked to contribute information and ideas based on real-world experience to the activists of Atlantis. The narrative helps to establish continuity among the QA elements and helps to bridge the fictional world of Atlantis with the real world of Earth, an act of interpretation by each individual child.

In a very real way, we are attempting to reclaim the story medium in one of its contemporary forms--i.e., videogames--to use it in a socially-responsive way and at the same time undo the problems that are currently associated with the use of this form. The challenge has been to develop an adaptive entity that is not simply about playing yet remains engaging, is not a lesson yet fosters learning, and is not evangelical yet still promotes a social agenda. As a design-based research project, our work involves interacting with the developed play space, in both its material and social forms, to understand and advance specific research questions and particular theoretical claims.

You can read more on the project or even get a guest account, download the 3D client software, and give it a try. http://QuestAtlantis.Org

Category: Ecology-of-Games

Tags: game, learning-environment, quest-atlantis

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