Come share your ideas on a Student Congress.
An idea had been mulling for some months now about creating a world in Quest Atlantis where students can take up ownership, leadership and have opportunities to share their lifeworld experiences in the QA social commitments.
The first formal meeting of our steering group happened this week to focus on writing a design proposal for a new world where the particpants will be the designers. What will it look like? What will the students roles be? What will motivate students to come here? What passport will be required to get there? What resourcing issues will we have? What infrastructure will support the goals? Six teachers and our first very brave student member met to begin to answer some of these questions.
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Tags: leadership, participatory design, student design, teacher contribution, teacher design
Posted by Melissa Gresalfi on Jan 22, 2010 in
Design Cartography, coordinate plotting, and the ethical tensions of archeology combine in our new math mission in Quest Atlantis. Questers receive a message in a bottle, calling for help. Furious at having a team of archeologists investigate its secrets, the island takes revenge by trapping the director of the dig, Dr. Leo. With an assistant too concerned with the rule book to take action, the quester must step into the jungle to save the well-intentioned, yet adventurous, Dr. Leo. Of course, the island will resist an outsider’s presence, so the Questers have quite a challenge on their hands.
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Tags: Design
Teacher Connections restarted back in September and the last 4 months have raised some very interesting discussions as well as opportunities for QA teachers to locate mentors, local teaching buddies, join collaborative projects and source prospective co-questing classes. The December meetings were small but very engaging as many Southern Hemisphere schools are now preparing for end of the year and retiring their QA classes and US counterparts were getting back in the swing after Thanksgiving celebrations.
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Tags: collaboration, community of practice, social networking, teacher contribution
One of the challenges of creating an online gaming curriculum is also creating a means for teachers to experience the game while understanding how to support its content. Going through the Mesa Verde Unit as a student, for example, will give you a great idea of how to support students procedurally — that is to say, how to complete the tasks, where the characters are located, etc. But, an important part of the QA teaching experience is also pushing on our students’ understanding of the content so they truly understand what it means to use what they’ve learned in a meaningful way. While the Unit Plan offers many suggestions for teachers, wouldn’t it be great if you could both experience the Unit AND learn about new ways to support your students conceptual understanding of the material at the same time? Read more…
Tags: Ander City, Classroom practice, community of practice, Modern Prometheus, Taiga, teacher contribution, theme-based instruction
Posted by Steve Zuiker on Nov 12, 2009 in
Kid Voices In our work with Quest Atlantis here in Singapore, my colleague Doreen and I repeatedly confront the pragmatic ambitions of a well-run, centrally-organized education system. It is therefore a pleasure for us when the things that kids say as they contribute to QA make us to step back for a moment. In this post, we share one such episode that occurred recently in the home of a not atypical local family. The video is not particularly long, but we think it highlights QA’s influence on the mindsets of both Singapore children and their parents. Before rolling the film, however, we think it is also important to share some of the tensions that QA must navigate in Singapore’s “schooling straits” and so we begin by setting up the video with a bit of background information. Read more…
Tags: family, home, Singapore, transformational play
Posted by Lucy Barrow on Nov 3, 2009 in
Kid Voices,
Teacher Voices It was exactly twelve months ago that I attended a Quest Atlantis presentation at the Australian Computers in Education Conference in Canberra. Since then, an amazing journey has unfolded for our students, teachers and even parents! Participating in QA has far exceeded our expectations. At first, it was hoped that QA would provide us with an innovative way to deliver aspects of our curriculum. However, it became quite evident after only a short time, that what we had in fact been given was an incredible opportunity on a number of different levels. So what are these other opportunities? Read more…
Tags: caring, curriculum, transformation, values
I was setting up accounts in the next Teacher Online Professional Development for QA and I got a Skype call from someone I did not recognize. I did not accept the call but instant messaged the person to find out what they wanted. The caller said they were part of the next online course and wanted to know when their account would be ready. I proceeded to tell the caller that he would need a partner teacher as is this is a requirement of our online PD program; schools must present 2 teachers in the workshop. He went on to make excuses and say that the school was poorly resourced with computers and could not present 2 teachers and started putting forward more and more excuses. Hmm, I became suspicious … Read more…
Tags: meaning, ownership, transformation, value
Quest Atlantis Units (Taiga, Plague, Ander City Statistics, Spacenik, etc.) are the curricular features that give teachers and students the biggest reward, in motivation, engagement, and learning. But they also require the biggest investment in time—often taking up to 12 days in the computer lab with more classroom and teacher prep time to support them. But check it out—with a little advance planning these same Units can SAVE you even more time, while addressing content standards across the board in nearly every subject area! The key is to think of them as opportunities for theme-based multi-curricular units. You’ll be amazed at the number of content standards the QA Units can address.
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Tags: content standards, curriculum, multi-curricular, theme-based instruction
Posted by Ed on Sep 29, 2009 in
Design,
In The News QA designers trip the text-fantastic every day. As the primary dialogue writer on the project, I hit the quote mark key on my keyboard more frequently than most journalists. Experience has taught us that students who use QA can benefit in a myriad number of ways from the dialogue we write. Reading skills can improve, immersion in the setting cam deepen and overall learning of the concepts can grow when players care about the characters that they get to know through dialogue. In a design I’m working on now, however, I find myself trying to minimize dialogue and focus on 3-D functionality. For this particular project, it feels more authentic and immersive to have players reading almost no dialogue. Instead, have them be nearly exclusively mindful of the consequences of decisions by observing what’s changing in the 3-D space as they make decisions. Read more…
Posted by jrdeleon on Sep 20, 2009 in
QA Community of Practice,
Teacher Voices
The Quest Atlantis experience is taking over the Central Florida area like a storm. As Central Floridians, we have grown accustomed to all kinds of storms, but Quest Atlantis is “blowing everyones mind”. Starting with the first two schools last year, we now have nine trained schools within the Seminole County area. At the same time as the quantity of participating schools increases, a number of support structures have been designed to insure a strong collaborative network for educators participating in the QA virtual world environment.
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Tags: collaboration, community, conference, quest atlantis, standards, teacher contribution
