The Official Quest Atlantis Blog
My post here builds on Donna’s recent comments about the fun quotient in teacher learning in Quest Atlantis. Teacher involvement in Quest Atlantis is not only a chance to get back in touch with your sense of play but a chance to be part of a burgeoning professional learning community. Let me describe some of [...]
“For every job that must be done, there’s an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game!” Mary Poppins Dr. Melissa Gresalfi and I were brainstorming earlier this week about some new professional development Missions we’re creating aimed at helping teachers get a handle on some of our most popular [...]
Just came across this video with QA and World of Warcraft in the same video post! Wow, isn’t that a cool moment for a designer…my work posted in the same video with Warcraft. Not that I have any grandiose visions that this is a meaningful comparison, but big dreams Watch Video. //–< ![CDATA[ $j("a#mesa_verde_trailer").fancybox({ 'hideOnContentClick' [...]
So many exciting things are in the works with Quest Atlantis and the partnership with One Planet Education Network! A quick example – the cable network television show, “Designing Spaces, Back to School special” will feature a fabulous segment on Quest Atlantis at work at a middle School in Durham, N.C., and the role OPEN [...]
We have now had this unit virtual world active almost 2 years and have been able to collect data on its value in multiple classrooms. Using this data and some recent improvements in our graphic potential (as well as lots of amazing work by Ellen Jameson, Janis Watson, and Gary Neely), we have updated the virtual world. While much of the original design remained untouched, this new iteration is certainly more visually appealing and realistic (see images on Flickr). However, what is really useful from a curricular perspective is how the revised narratives engages students in more deeply thinking about notions of civilization, and the way it prompts them to examine more deeply the natural and cultural heritage of indigenous cultures.
In particular, the current scenario requires students to learn about what factors combine to constitute a civilization (permanent structures, division of labor, farming, art, writing, etc) and to interrogate the sophistication of indigenous cultures in America. Over the course of the unit, students uncover evidence in the daily lives, culture, agrarian practices, and ruling structures of the Puebloans, which help them decide whether or not the ancient people of Mesa Verde should be considered a civilization or whether the pilgrims were the first true civilization to occupy America.
In our first implementation, while students were engaged, our research showed that they learned little content and the motivation was determined to be limited in establishing legitimacy of the academic content. In particular, the initial narrative rested on the premise of negotiating whether Columbus discovered America, a tension revolved quite quickly through game play. To complexify the learning scenario and make the narrative tensions endure over the entire two-week unit, we added the theme of ‘Civilization.’
The Mesa Verde Unit provides students with an opportunity to travel back in time to learn more about the Ancestral Puebloan people who inhabited an area in the American southwest over 1400 years ago. Students are contacted by Lorisa, a modern day Hopi teenager, who is haunted by dreams and images after neglecting to speak up on behalf of her ancestral history. She invites players to travel to Mesa Verde to help her understand the meaning behind the strange images. The questions at the heart of the curricular drama now are whether Columbus was the first civilized presence in America, what constitutes a civilization, and what factors might lead to the fall of a civilization?
We have spent a lot of time this summer thinking about what goes on in classrooms when students log off of Quest Atlantis….how do the stories and experiences that kids have in the game come into the classroom? We’re especially interested in the whole-class conversations that take place around the content that kids are learning; how, [...]
When we unveiled the new vendor economy system, we had no idea that the next month would be so exciting. I was able to follow the trail of ten students over the course of the implementation. This post is our story, a kind of telling of what happened on both hands and how we learned [...]
As I’m sure anyone who has been in the OTAK Hub in the past couple of days knows, there are some new changes in QA. We were really excited to see that some of the first people to log in were teachers and that the changes were met with enthusiasm. The students had some mixed-reactions [...]
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