If the whole class is given usernames that are nothing but a string of letters and numbers, 65427 may feel you can’t really distinguish him from 65327 or 65426. Students work hard when they first start using Quest Atlantis to recognize their friends, build their own identity, and meet new people. They can easily wtake an entire class period to navigate who is who if usernames are not easily recognizable. Imagine how much more time kids will spend connecting with others if they need to clarify the person behind the numbers every time they login. In addition, the lack of accountability can cause a rise in cyberbullying or other inappropriate behaviors. We’ve seen this effect in Quest Atlantis and it has even gone so far as to cause us to deactivate entire classes of these unidentifiable usernames that could not follow the IBURSTrules. This is not confined just to our program though, as psychologists are starting to publish papers on what they call the Online Disinhibition Effect.

The flip side, of course, is that students should not be too personal on the internet either. BrianSmith should not be sharing his first and last name with the entire internet, and almost all interactive applications show the username so he is probably giving away the information to more people than he realizes. How then do we find the perfect balance between creating that online identity and still keeping kids safe? The key is to find usernames that kids can relate to that also do not give away too much. Here are some good examples we’ve seen over the years:

• StevieS -> The first name and last initial allows me to identify with this persona but it would still be hard to find me in the real world
• Stevie46 -> Only my teacher and I know that 46 is the number of my classroom and it would be hard for someone else to figure that out
• Sudokugirl -> This username doesn’t share any personal information about me, but I can still relate to it

One of the great things about Quest Atlantis is that it is a safe space for children online (only the licensed teachers we have trained and their current students have access to the general space), but it is treated as though it were the general internet. Students are taught exactly what they should and shouldn’t be doing before the consequences could become much more severe. And those students who share their last name or phone number will have an email sent to the teachers so they can discuss why certain things should not be given online.

Another thing that students learn is that their password is to remain quiet. An unfortunate lesson that one of our students had to learn was that her login information was her account and everything that happens with it was her responsibility. When she gave away the login information to her brother and he didn’t follow the rules, she was still the one who had to deal with the consequences. In this case the account was put into single-user mode for a few days. Of course, even a quiet password can be discovered if it is too easy. I would never use the password “stevie” for example. This would be especially problematic to give to a whole class of kids as it only takes one to figure out the pattern for all the logins to be compromised. Passwords might be the best place to use the string of random letters and numbers – most internet applications recommend that passwords use a combination of numbers, letters, and cases.

These are just a few ways for kids to start thinking about how to build their safe online identity. However, this is just the beginning and the best way to protect children on the internet is to keep the lines of communication open.

Student building in QVille

One of our main goals with Quest Atlantis is to position students to be actively engaged in the learning process and not just passive recipients. This still requires quite a bit of intervention and scaffolding from our part and the teachers’; but students still have one place where they have free reign – QVille. And the best lesson we can learn from QVille is that even when left completely to their own devices, students will still try to actively make sense of the world around them.

QVille started as a world where students could explore 3D building and play a little, but by the time I came to QA in 2008 it had already evolved beyond that. Students are able to rent a plot of land for six cols (QA’s currency) a month. Since this is the equivalent of 2-3 solid essays for the teacher a month, the price was often too steep for some children to get a lot or maintain it for long. In response, those children who had the extra cols would rent lots and build hotels. Students wanting an area of their own could then rent a room from the original builder at a more affordable price of one col a month. The students with more than six rooms in their hotels found a way to turn a profit.

Qville Stock Market Information

By 2011, a simple hotel is just old hat. Students are wanting more out of the QVille experience and even more of a profit. Now, hotels and other business have the option to join the QVille Stock Market or a company. I know the first time I saw kids talking about the stock exchange, I was skeptical – can elementary school kids really understand the complexities of the stock exchange? It would appear so. When buying stock, you give the business a certain amount of money depending on how well it is doing when you buy your stock. Each “stock” is equivalent to one percent of the company, and at the end of the month you are entitled to one percent of the profits in addition to being allowed to make decisions about the business. If the company is doing really well and others want to buy the stock you can sell it at the new price. This is not the NYSE, these are the rules of the QVille Stock Exchange.

Advertising others in the company

With all this money and investment going on, students are now more responsible for the continuation of their hotels and businesses. You now have the option to enter your business in a partnership with a Qville “company,” which resembles a conglomerate in the real world. Multiple business, including restaurants, hotels, arenas, and karaoke bars, enter into these companies in order to help one another by advertising the others or giving building advice. As part of the company, students are required to maintain company standards in the quality of their buildings, follow company protocol which could even include a uniform, and attend meetings.

Now that money and regulations are involved, laws must be enacted, right? Students are working on a Qville Supreme Court with judges, lawyers, and police. The chat excerpt below shows two students working to set a legal norm.

These new interactive Quests are smaller than a mission and should only take a class period or two. These Quests no longer appear as spinning disks; instead, they are given out by Quest-Givers. These Quest-Givers represent Questers who have shown great devotion to one of the social commitments and now work to help the emissaries and OTAK. They are easily distinguished by the spinning Quest disks above their heads. The Quest-Givers, along with the teen council, offer some exciting new in-game role models for the kids to look up to.

Writing some of these Quests has offered great insight into all that goes into developing Quest Atlantis. It wasn’t easy giving each Quest-Giver a unique personality or trying to establish a basis for why students are completing the Quests. I struggled a lot at the beginning making sure that I had a reason for doing the work, not just “do this Quest because I’m a Quest-Giver and I said so.” I now have way more sympathy for just how much work our designers,  Janis and Ed, put into creating our entire units!

We hope to continue adding more interactive Quests in the future. I have a few I’m working on that are almost ready to go. The eventual goal is to have the majority of our Quests contain some interactive element. There’s no reason to have such a lively world and static work!

Although not all of our Quests have been converted to interactive Quests at the moment, a good selection has. I invite you to try out one or two with your students! To find the new interactive Quests in your toolkit, look for (IQ) after the Quest name. You can also check out some of the  starter Quests recommended by teachers on the QA Teacher wikipage, http://quest-atlantis-teaching.wikispaces.com/. Feel free to leave your own impressions as well!

To prepare for the new transition, I just want to let everyone know where we’ve been and where we’re heading.

Recently, we’ve reached a mission milestone. There have been over 100,000 missions completed by 50,000 Questers. That doesn’t include Quests and units! It’s great to see how well the program has been taken up by kids.

We have active schools in 18 countries. This is a wonderful opportunity for your students to work with others. If you would like to be set up with a partner class or co-Quest, please let your QA Buoy or a team member know.

Students have completed over 1750 jobs in the OTAK village, earning anywhere from 5-30 cols. They have many options when it comes to spending these cols, but Qville is probably the most popular. And these past few months have seen every Qville lot be rented out by Questers.

During the new introduction, Questers will go to the mountain top to meet OTAK, touch the Arch, and activate their own personal Shardflower.

There have been 10,700 votes at the polls, and more posts than we can count on the bulletin boards.

Of course, when it comes to numbers bigger doesn’t always need to mean better. We will be releasing a new intro later this month that should take less time for your students to complete. This will get them chatting, exploring, and working on your assigned work even faster! Be sure to keep an eye out for more information soon.

We look forward to collaborating with everyone soon and continuing the numbers game.

By far my favorite part of working with the QA team is reading the chat and seeing what goes through kids’ heads on a daily basis. They certainly have a complex way of looking at the world and think on a much higher level than most adults give them credit for.

For example, before the winter holidays two girls were talking about the difference between the friendships you make online and in person. QA has students all over the world and it’s encouraging to see friendships spring up between students who otherwise would have had no chance to meet. These particular girls were debating on whether you need to know someone in person to really like them or if the way you have a crush on someone you met online is the same kind of crush you would develop on someone you met at school. Of course, these are questions I couldn’t answer myself.

Then again, there are also the just-plain-fun chats. I was able to explain to students that giving away your height is not against the Iburst rules. Although, I’m still not really sure why they needed to know my height. (It’s about 5′ 5″, by the way.) But, it is encouraging to see them thinking about the rules critically and how to protect themselves on the internet. There are also times when students will warn another not to use names. Our stance is that first name only is ok, but students should never feel pressured to give out more information than they are comfortable with or their teacher allows.

We’ve also seen students starting to understand geography and how people can come from different places. We had one student doing a states project on Florida and asking questions of another student who lives in Florida. They were talking about the wildlife and the student in Florida responded “in Florida we have snakes, and up in North America they have bears.” That same week a student from Canada was talking about how excited she was to visit America for the first time. She admitted that she had been to America before but it was only driving through on her way to Disney World. In another instance one of the younger students in North America was talking to a teacher in Australia. She was trying to wrap her head around time zones and that it could be night in Australia but still morning in America. Finally she asked the teacher, “So are you from the future?”

The Olympics will be coming to an end this week but that doesn’t mean students need to stop thinking of ways to bridge the gap with others around the world. Afterall, there will always be someone from the future out there.

For the students who like exploration this was an opportunity. Then some of those who had been playing longer felt disoriented and unsure of where they were in the world. Since it has been a point of pride among the kids to help newcomers, they probably felt they no longer had anything to offer other students. Everyone is “new” in a sense and has been on the same playing field for the time being. However, as the majority of the game play remains the same, such as quests and missions, they will most likely adapt to the new Hub quickly and be able to help the income students.