Beginning in November 2010 and continuing sporadically every few months, ALL Questers have been invited to take a “vacation” to a world that they might never have seen before. All they have to do is visit Brooke—our uber-gracious southern belle who serves as travel agent in OTAK Village—during the appropriate month. Brooke will give them a special, one-month-only ticket to the featured vacation spot. That ticket is good for as many visits as they’d like to take that month.

Brooke will also hand out a fun OTAK mission to guide their trip, full of suggestions about things to do and see while there. If Questers complete this totally-voluntary mission before midnight on the last day of the month, Brooke will add a special stamp to their QA Passports.

These tourist missions are just-for-fun only, encouraging students to thoroughly explore the spaces and learn a little something about them… and maybe convince their teachers to assign the units so that they can return sometime. But even though these aren’t teacher-assigned missions, we all know that the best vacations are those where you learn a little something new, right? So what kinds of things do Questers learn on their QA vacations? Glad you asked!

In November they get to visit a virtual copy of Mesa Verde National Park, exploring ruins and learning a little about the Ancestral Puebloans who built it. In February they’re off to the gothic village of Ingolstadt, patterned after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There they can climb into creepy tombs, look for skeletons, and learn interesting trivia about the author, the novel, and even the Hollywood version of the Frankenstein story!

Now it is May, and the vacation locale for this month is Taiga Park. Here Questers do some hiking, fishing, and cave exploring in order to earn a Junior Ranger’s badge. And in September… well, that vacation is still in the planning stages, so you’ll have to check with Brooke to find out more.

Oh, and one last thing: No vacation is complete without a souvenir or two. Questers can buy a tourist t-shirt, especially designed for each locale and ready to wear with pride. Who could ask for a better holiday?

We kept our core characters, Maq and OTAK, and even grew their roles. OTAK has evolved several times during the lifespan of Quest Atlantis: from an artificial intelligence that lectured Questers and had all the answers to a frightened little boy who couldn’t possibly handle the responsibilities of running New Atlantis. Now, with the latest version, OTAK has become a young man who feels the weight of a lot of responsibility and isn’t always so sure what to do… but steps up when called upon to do so, and continues to mature as the story progresses. And Maq the Gnome has evolved as well. In his first iteration, Maq had plenty of personality but little in the way of agency or goals. Now he has agendas of his own that are clear but not simplistic. His relationship with OTAK is not easy and hits many bumps along the way, but is committed and loving nonetheless. Our hope is that Questers can more easily identify with these more realistic depictions of characters… maybe even seeing some of themselves and those in their lives in these characters.

When the decision was made to change the back story and introduction of Quest Atlantis, it was immediately apparent that the Epic Missions would have to change as well. Epic is a collection of missions that Questers “earn” as they luminate… it serves as both a reward and a continuation of the storyline. Because the old QA storyline was now defunct, those old Epic missions just didn’t fit any more.

Enter Aegea, the home of the new Epic mission collection. Aegea is a previously unknown island on New Atlantis, far removed from Emissary Island. Not only are the people very different from the usual New Atlantian in looks, with their olive-green skin tone and blue hair, but they also evidence a sad lack of commitment. This new version of the Epic missions has become a vehicle for Questers to witness what happens when NONE of the Social Commitments are honored in a community. Other than a few unique individuals, the Aegeans, when Questers first meet them, are a selfish, unhappy, and bland people. Few of them care about others, the community, or the environment, and any individuality or creativity is frowned upon or openly mocked.

Questers first encounter Aegeans in the new Commission Missions during the QA introduction… it was the main reason for rewriting the Commissions along with the Introduction this past summer. Letting Questers get a taste for the problems in Aegea, while at the same time focusing on a single Social Commitment in a community that desperately needs the help, turned out to be a serendipitous pairing that enhanced both trajectories.

As Questers continue to luminate they earn additional missions that propel the Epic storyline along a path of transformation. Questers are active protagonists who model good acts and committed lives to the citizens. By the end of the trajectory (after the eighth lumination), the Quester has transformed Aegea from a gray, lifeless and unpleasant village to a vibrant, busy, and healthy community. Not only do attitudes change, but the physical space changes as well… once again embodying the QA commitment to transformational play. Questers experience the thrill and hardship of employing the Social Commitments in bringing together an entire community to save itself. They feel the sting of loss and the joy of cooperation. Most importantly, they do it themselves, making their choices and seeing the consequences of those choices.

Aegea, before and after Questers transform the space

ONE FINAL NOTE: Because we believe this new Epic collection is such an important addition to Questers’ growth in Quest Atlantis, we have added a new resource to support it, this time for teachers. Our new Epic teacher’s guide provides not only a description of the story and educational goals of the experience, but it includes a new feature: a set of optional QA trajectories of Quests, missions, and units, grouped by academic subjects and the number of lumins each delivers. We hope our QA teachers will find these sample trajectories useful as they plan their QA curricula with an eye to helping their students luminate and earn the Epic missions quickly.

Janis & Ed

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!

Let’s take a quick look at the possibilities afforded by one QA Unit—our newest release, Virtual Mesa Verde (VMV).

A review of the Unit Guide shows standards alignments for the main subject area covered in the Unit—social studies— addressing geography and world history concepts like the balance of resources with human needs and the characteristics of civilization.

But there is a lot more content that can be mined for standards correlations in many other subject areas. Although you won’t find these standards listed in our Unit Guide (we can’t show correlations based on what a teacher MIGHT do with the content), additional standards addressed in these Units is limited only by the teacher’s imagination and need.

For example, every QA Unit is narrative-based, and the storylines and characters are designed as interactive novels in which Questers become active characters in the story. Think of the language arts content standards that you can cover by examining the characters (motivations, personalities); plot (conflict and resolution, climax and anticlimax); author’s purpose, tone, and craft; and the characteristics of fiction, science fiction, and fantasy! And that’s not all—each Unit also has unique “mini-lessons” that can enhance instruction in many other disciplines. VMV affords possibilities in:

• Science: The VMV Unit is filled with possibilities for science exploration, from agricultural science (the three-sisters gardening process favored by many native cultures and dryland irrigation techniques) to the study of the effects of wildfires on ecosystems and wildfire recovery science, and even more possibilities too numerous to outline here.
• Language Arts: The Unit’s main character, Lorisa, tells Questers a simplified version of the Hopi creation story. Why not compare that story with creation stories from indigenous people in your area or from cultures you’re studying in social studies classes, aligning instruction to comparative literature and mythology standards?
• Math: A technician from CyArk (http://archive.cyark.org/) demonstrates the use of laser technology to create accurate three-dimensional digital measurements (using bearing, inclination, and distance). Students can explore 3D measurements and scale by creating models of cliff dwellings and kivas.
• Social Studies: In addition to the main SS content specified in the VMV Unit Guide, the time travel features of the Unit also lend themselves well to activities in time, continuity, and change. Or expand the storyline with an in-depth study of the importance of primary source materials like artifacts in historical research.
• Art: Ancestral Puebloan (sometimes called Anasazi) pottery is distinctive for its black-and-white geometric designs. Have students create their own pottery and design new variations of this technique. Or plan a lesson on Ancestral Puebloan glyphs and decorations, exploring not only the art but the meaning behind the symbols.

• Health: Lorisa is struggling with peer pressure that is affecting her behavior and her health. Use her problems as a springboard for discussions on the influences of personal beliefs, culture, mass media, and other factors on health and self image as well as ways to communicate care, consideration, and respect for self, parents and family, and the diversity of others.
• Careers: Explore the career possibilities in national parks services, including park rangers, archaeologists, and anthropologists.

The suggestions above are just a small sampling of the standards correlations possible through a theme-based implementation of VMV. An exploration of your own content standards will spark ideas unique to your curriculum. As you can see, rather than a drain on your valuable instructional time, the QA Units can help you cover MORE content standards while engaging your students in transformational learning activities that build skills they can use for a lifetime.

Next time you’re browsing through the Quest Atlantis curriculum, check out the possibilities!