The Official Quest Atlantis Blog
When we talk about effective instruction and positioning the learner as an active agent of change who transforms the world in powerful ways, the issue of teacher training becomes central. How do we, as educators, prepare learners to participate in such an interactive way? And also, how do we equip our pre-service teachers to respond [...]
Community News/QVille To start with, let me explain just who I am and what I do at Quest Atlantis. I (Scott Miller…aka Enkar in QA) am a retired Tier-2 Technical Manager at AT&T. “Tier-2” means I provided technical support to the top-craft technicians in the field. Since 1998 I have been involved with the online [...]
How does one test the implications of his or her ethical stance? How does one realize the potentialities of one’s ethical stance on a community, national, and global level? Often times, ethical teaching and thinking are reduced to a specialized form of rhetoric where one is required to “consider” all sides and make a recommendation [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Each of the main Units currently have theme parks: Taiga, Virtual Mesa Verde, Plague and Statistics. In the coming months, additional theme parks for Spacenik and Drakos will also be found in Teacherville.
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, [...]
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' [...]
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?
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 [...]
Quest for Atlantis: Legends of a Lost Continent (An Anthology): The story of Atlantis began in 360 B.C. when the... http://t.co/PhlM9GNm 
Quest for Atlantis: Legends of a Lost Continent (An Anthology): The story of Atlantis began in 360 B.C. when the... http://t.co/dhEOJMTi 
QUEST FOR ATLANTIS Large Print: Fantasy adventure story for young adults, in Large Print. Chooker, the Queen's ... http://t.co/zDE6RHwk 
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