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.

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?

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.

Credit: Christian F. Burprich

Lately, I have been working towards internationalization of Quest Atlantis resources such as missions, dialogue pages and quests. The impetus for this challenging task is being driven by the team’s desire and vision to provide a more localized experience for our users whose native language is not English. For brevity, I will use the acronym i18n in lieu of internationalization henceforth. This blog post is largely about how I have and am going about modifying the exisiting system to support i18n. Subsequently, unveil new tools that we have introduced to support the translations .

To adopt i18n, the first thing I had to do was convert our database to support a unicode-compliant character set. UTF-8 is perhaps the most popular one  particularly because of its backward compatibility with ASCII text. For example, without unicode encoding capability of the database, the following piece of Simplified Chinese text: 现在，您可以继续史诗！(Translation: You can now continue with Epic!) would appear to be stored incorrectly as: ???????????.

It is just not a matter of storing and retrieving characters from all types of languages in the database correctly. The web pages that are rendering the text retrieved from the database needs to inform your browser that you are viewing characters that are encoded in the UTF-8 format. The 2D aspect of Quest Atlantis, i.e., the web pages that drive the game play narratives, dialogues with NPC, your Q-Pod, Q-Pack, the teacher toolkit etc  are at their core a collection, a very large collection, of perl scripts. There are over a thousand of these scripts with lines of code amassing over 300,000. I suppose you can somewhat gauge the magnitude of trying to introduce i18n to such a large codebase.

Last year, I did some work in creating the translation interface for our dialogue pages, but it wasn’t quite done right. Particularly, because the feature is only available to users with designer rights in our system. Since, we would like to welcome participation from people proficient in non-English languages to translate our resources, we came up with a new Translator role to facilitate this, whilst ensuring the original English content does not get subjected to edits.

During the last 3 years, we have been making piecemeal efforts to migrate a lot of these perl scripts into Ruby-on-Rails space for quicker development of new features and easier management of our game design and project support tools. Therefore this time around, I created the  missions translations interface in rails.

The 1st screenshot on the left is what the translation interface for missions now looks like. As you can see the original content appears on the right-hand column and the translator will simply to fill in the corresponding translations in the left-hand column fields.

The 2nd screenshot on the left showing the Spanish translation of the missions page. I have also added in provisions for languages like Arabic and Hebrew with right-to-left directionality to appear properly.

An exciting feature that I added to make the work of translators easier is integration with the Google Translate API. Each field that is translatable has the translation icon available to auto-translate. It is very possible that the auto-translate feature will miss the grammatical correctness, colloquial and cultural nuances of the translated-to language. It will nonetheless save the translator a substantial amount of time where s/he can just focus on fixing the auto-translation rather than having to write the translations from scratch.

The translations will be subject to admin approval, whereupon approval, the mission translation will appear in the live space provided the user’s language preference matches that of the translated-to language.

For missions we have added in support for the following languages:

• Chinese
• French
• German
• Hebrew
• Italian
• Korean
• Spanish
• Turkish

Please contact our team if you are interested in supporting us translate to the language(s) you are proficient in. I am currently working on introducing this translation functionality for Quests and Dialogue pages, so stay tuned for new updates!

All too often the great tales of momentus Quest Atlantis value are left in the classrooms from where they emanate. In 2011 we will move to strengthen our sharing of practices. Our Teacher Connection Meetings continue on the first Thursday of the month, in three timezones (Asia-Pacific, USA/Canada and Europe) over skype and inworld. In these meetings we often troubleshoot, share stories, invite guest speakers and generally enjoy the company of other QA educators. The 2011 kick off  meeting will take place on February 3rd with invited guest speaker teachers in each region sharing their expert practice.

In the early part of this year we will be offering training for teachers wishing to use our new interface to develop and share their own Quest activities in the world. Teacher contributions will keep the curriculum of QA culturally diverse, dynamic, topical and globally relevant. There will also be a virtual buoy camp to gather all our facilitators together in a refresher/celebration of the global distributed leadership of Quest Atlantis.

Questers in our Student Congress, a world built and designed by students, are are working  hard right now to prepare for a February launch of that world. This is a place for students to step up and be the designers, leaders, and managers of their own virtual world experiences and learning. Watch out for announcements on this as it promises to be one of the most exciting additions to our Quest Atlantis community.

From my perpective this Edublog award represents so much of what makes QA exciting, and is a much deserved token of how mature our program and community are.  

Let’s all pull together to make 2011 another winning year!

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

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!

The Biogen Idec Foundation aims to provide students with innovative ways of exploring science literacy and hopes to introduce children to the prospect of one day entering into a career in science.  Their grant specifically allows teachers in the Durham Public School system the opportunity to use the Taiga Water Quality unit. In this unit, students interact with virtual park rangers, loggers, fishermen, and indigenous people, uncovering the multiple perspectives surrounding the issue of the fish population declining in a river in a virtual national park. The students take water samples at three points along the virtual river, run these samples in a virtual lab (which scaffolds the learning of pH, turbidity, eutrophication, etc.), and use the resulting data to uncover where the problems in the water exist. Finally, they create a scientific report detailing a plan to bring life back to the river and ecosystem while balancing the needs of all the local peoples. 

As students explore the situation, they are making important discoveries about how disciplinary learning can be a powerful tool for making meaningful changes in the world.  Students are not only learning about the scientific water quality terms and processes; they are developing an understanding that science is actually a powerful tool they can use to solve problems and make a difference in the world, and the students themselves realize that this acquiring this knowledge is precisely what empowers them to solve these problems.

As I reflect on the current state of education in our country, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if more companies like Biogen Idec or its Foundation helped to empower children is such a way. What if more companies focused not just on company profits, but also choose to invest in their communities, in the children and in the future, to help students to care about disciplinary knowledge?  What if we could help our students realize that understanding and enlisting academic content is one way to truly solve problems in the world?  Just imagine how differently our students might approach their school day, and how their attitude towards education may change in the process, especially if they knew that profitable companies, not just their parents and school teachers, valued their contributions and chose to invest in their future.  What a world of difference this kind of partnership could make for our students and for our schools. 

Making a difference in the world through the use of science…Through their commitment to their patients, their employees and their support of education in their community, the Biogen Idec Foundation seems to be able to teach us all this very important lesson very well.

What is Family Quest?

Family Quest is a new program within the context of Quest Atlantis that brings parents and children together in an afterschool, school, or home context and engages them in intergenerational play. The game starts out with a new adventure, one wherein families find themselves stranded on a mysterious island with the Lindemans, fictional family friends. It is up to the parent and the child working together to get past the challenges that come in their way, and help Maq, the gnome, to revive the Tree of Life (see our website for more information).

Why were we interested in bringing parents and children together around a video game?

Research suggests that family relations undergo major transformations to accomodate the cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and social changes children go through during the transition from childhood to adolescence. Around upper elementary and middle school, children become active participants of different communities and create their own practices outside of their family life. Consequently, parents and children spend less and less time together around collaborative activities when, in fact, parents continue to play an important role in children’s learning.

The typical ways of engaging with digital technologies create situations where children and parents do not have to interact. In fact, parents and children often engage in different activities with technology. Parents use cell phones and the Internet to facilitate communication with their children and to coordinate activities and daily life routines. Children, on the other hand, spend extensive time online, multitasking (e.g. chatting, downloading music, internet surfing), and connecting with their friends. In addition, parents monitor their children’s activities with technology and the Internet but rarely do they see participation in technology as a way to learn and connect with their chilren. Creating a game environment that support collaboration between parents and children provides opportunities for family connection and dialogue that might not otherwise less likely to occur.

What are the design considerations behind Family Quest?

Family Quest is intentionally designed to balance between entertainment and education in that it brings lessons learned from video game design and research on motivation and learning to meet the needs of parents and children to have fun and learn together. In addition, our research suggests that game scenarios that involve personally meaningful dilemmas are likely to provide opportunities for parents and children to engage in transformative conversations (Siyahhan, Barab, & Downton, 2010). We included several dilemma game scenarios that require parents and children to work together in Family Quest and encourage them to discuss social and personal issues.  

Family Quest is a great way for parents to connect with their kids. It is also a great way for teachers and facilitators to bridge home-school-community relations.

Excited? Experience yourself how a video game can support family learning and bonding:

Parents can request an account on our website and play the game with their children.

Teachers & Facilitators can ask a Family Quest facilitator to support you in setting you up as a center to run Family Quest program.  

For more information, download the Family Quest brochure,  get an account by visiting our website or contact a member of the Quest Atlantis Family Quest team at atlantis@indiana.edu.

Sharing some history. About six years ago, when I first learned that QA was to be funded the second time by the National Science Foundation, I was simultaneously excited and concerned. I was excited because I believed in what we were trying to do. As a former drug counselor and subsequent special education teacher, there was a strong commitment in me to find ways to motivate children to care about themselves, their community, and the world. I had experienced the power of education in motivating children and had also experienced how much of the curriculum in school was failing to do so and even turning them off. Therefore, I wanted to produce a suite of curricular opportunities that would allow teachers to engage their students in powerful life narratives that required understanding academic content all in the context of their classrooms. When I learned that NSF was going to support our efforts I knew that science would also have to take a front-row seat, and met with the team to determine what designs had to be put in place to ensure that the broader QA Social Commitment agenda would not be lost (see manuscript on critical design). For, while I was excited about the support, I feared that we might lose the heart of the project as we optimized experiences to support science content learning. As it so turned out, the Shardflower was born and this science unit engaged children in a form of socio-scientific inquiry that was as much about the role of science in solving socially significant problems as it was about understanding, for example, what is an appropriate level of phosphates in a body of water (see manuscript on socio-scientific inquiry).

Moving Forward. Well, as many of our veteran teachers are aware, this desire to ensure that the game fostered a disposition for social action led to the birth of the Shardflower and the idea that players, through the manifestation of wise acts, could earn lumins. Wise acts contain knowledge, attitude, and behavior: an important combination that is central to the newly released Epic trajectory. As players complete various missions and earn lumins, they eventually are able to luminate on each of the seven petals and outer leaves of their Shardflower. The Shardflower itself provides a metaphorical key to unlock important backstory elements that drive the game forward. Well, it has been a real challenge to provide an experience that is educational but not didactic, that is entertaining but not a casual game, and that is socially illuminative but not evangelical (see original Games W/Out Guns published five years ago). Importantly, and for those not familiar with modern videogames, they often contain rich stories in addition to fun gameplay, and every story needs a protagonist. More than a book to be read, in a game, the player has a form of dramatic agency. And, in a pedagogical game, or what we refer to as a curricular drama, the player is often protagonist at one point and audience member or simply participant at another point (see manuscript on the notion of curricular drama and one on transformational play). While we originally had a novel and had the player unlock chunks of dialogue communicating the backstory in game, it wasn’t very gamey (fun) and was narratively quite thin. Due to the countless hours and commitment of our team members and the ongoing feedback from the community, that has all changed this week.

The Present. We always had the core character of OTAK, but in the recently revised set of epic missions, Otak, a new character Maq, along with the Quester, take on significant protagonist roles designed to communicate the power of Social Commitments and the importance of the Quester in realizing them through their wise acts. At no other time in the history of QA has this story been so well crafted to be unlocked by the player. Due to the tireless work and dedication of our team, we now have an epic trajectory designed to embed the player within a rich backstory where he or she experiences the power of Social Commitments and the value of his or her work in QA. [Spoilers here]. It all begins with a distraught Maq who fled from a morally broken Atlantis with only his sorrow and a crystal salvaged from the tattered shards of the old Arch—all revealed in a beautifully illustrated set of comic pages (see legend PDF and video of backstory).

Following this description of the history, the player takes on a more active role in New Atlantis where they are recruited by the displaced caretaker, Maq, and the reluctant new caretaker OTAK. Together, the three go on an adventure as the player experiences another area (Aegea) of New Atlantis that has fallen to into moral apathy and that becomes overzealous at the belief that lumins might provide the key to mending their world—a belief that the Quester unintentionally seeded. Through this adventure, Maq, OTAK, and the player all come to understand what the lumin truly represents, and what a world without Social Commitments can end up becoming. Because this is not a book or movie, each of which has merit towards certain ends, this story is played out as the player solves puzzles and takes actions, experiencing the consequences of the particular choices they engaged. We encourage teachers to participate in this adventure along with their students by asking questions, supporting class discussions, and even playing along through the five Epic Missions unlocked through lumination moments. We hope that you all find the new experience as powerful as we hope it to be, putting a significant meta-wrapper around the more academic missions and units that you and your students complete. And, as always, I thank all the team members who worked so hard to make this happen.