Bragging Rights: Sharing exemplary Quest responses

Every school day in Quest Atlantis, hundreds of students submit responses to Quests, and teachers all over the world review those responses. And every workday, I receive several notifications from teachers who want to highlight an extraordinary response submitted by one of their students. I always get a little thrill when I read those nominations, because I know that these are efforts that make teachers proud… and a proud teacher is a happy teacher! There is no feeling on Earth to compare with seeing that spark … evidence that a student “gets it.” Being a former schoolteacher myself, I know that feeling. When one of my students turned in an assignment that knocked my socks off, I wanted to go door to door or shout it from the rooftops!

Until now, though, our QA teachers were bragging to a pretty small audience: the QA staff. Although I try to pass on highlighted Quest responses to the writers and designers who created the Quests in the first place, it just didn’t seem like enough. These teachers deserve bragging rights… a kind of virtual break room in Quest Atlantis where they can share with their peers the wonderful things their students are doing in Quest Atlantis. And there are benefits on the flip side, too. We know that other teachers get ideas of their own when they see how students and teachers around the world take up the QA content.

In the past, Quest Atlantis Core Worlds were littered with little sculptures like the one you see here. Those sculptures, when clicked by a Quester, delivered a “Highlighted Quest” that had been nominated by a teacher. The hope was that Questers would benefit by example and work harder on their own responses. But we haven’t added new exemplary Quests to those statues for some time, because there was some concern that enterprising (but perhaps less-than-ethical) Questers might be tempted to copy the Quest contents and submit them as their own… kind of goes against the Quest Atlantis social commitments, I think you’ll agree! So we no longer share highlighted Quests in the 3D space for Questers.

But that leaves us with the question of how to share those highlighted Quest responses. We wanted a fun and easy way to allow teachers to celebrate their students’ extraordinary efforts with others. The problem? Finding a way for teachers to share student work in a way that is easily accessible when they want to see them.  After a lot of discussion and brainstorming the QA implementation team has come up with a couple of possible solutions. We’re interested in your thoughts.

First, we decided to separate Quests that stand alone or are part of small Missions from Quests embedded in the major QA Units (Taiga, Plague, Ander City, Mesa Verde, and so on). Those exemplary Unit Quests are given special treatment, and can be found in the PD Theme Parks for each Unit, in Teacherville. Teachers interested in finding out more about those Units can visit the theme parks at any time. They can even go through PD Missions for a quick overview of the Units… but that’s a story for another time.

Unit-based exemplary Quests are stored in Madame Questar booths like this one, fashioned in the style of the old “Zoltar” fortune-telling booths from old-time carnivals and fairs. Madame Questar allows interested teachers not only to check out exemplary Quests nominated by their peers, but to nominate exceptional Quests of their own, like this one I nominated for the Virtual Mesa Verde Unit. Look for the Madame Questar booths in any PD theme park in Teacherville.

Now we’re working on another way to share the rest of the highlighted Quest responses. Here’s one idea: Also in Teacherville, there is an area —called the Midway, in keeping with our theme-park atmosphere—where we’ve placed carnival booths, benches, and a large fountain. The booths are places for QA teachers to get quick “how-to” tips on things that they may have forgotten (again, that’s a conversation for another day). But inside the Midway Fountain lives the Oracle, a character who will share a highlighted Quest with any teacher who steps up to the fountain and asks to see one.

Some questions remain to be addressed. For example, with the number of highlighted Quest responses we see daily, it would be too time-consuming to reformat these Quests like we do with the Unit Quests. What we can do is place these Quests into a database that will then draw one out at random whenever a teacher asks the Oracle to see one. What teachers will see is the same view that Questers find when they open an accepted Quest: the student’s response to both the main Quest goals and the reflection, and at the bottom, the teacher’s comments. I can’t show the format in this blog, but here’s an example of a highlighted Quest I just received from a teacher in Australia today.

We’d really like to hear your thoughts on these ideas. Do you think this will satisfy teachers’ need for bragging rights? Do you go to Teacherville when you’re planning your QA curriculum? Would you find it helpful to examine a random sampling of an exemplary Quest response? Tell us what you think!

Tags: Quests curriculum