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.

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.

Research has shown that even very young children have beliefs or intuitions of right and wrong. In the game world of Crypto, questers must decide whether to respect the island’s rules or uncover its secrets, particularly, whether to take artifacts out of the jungle or leave them undisturbed. This is a key dilemma in archeology; to whom to artifacts belong, and where should they be displayed? On the one hand, countless countries have been robbed of precious artifacts and keys to their history by other nations who are more powerful or have more resources. On the other hand, if artifacts stay only with the site where they were discovered, then peoples around the world lose an opportunity to better understand others’ histories. These tensions are exactly what the questers are asked to contend with.

As an example, one character, Archie, offers the quester cols in exchange for artifacts they remove from the island and deliver.

He also notes the importance of allowing others to learn about the important history of the island.  Thus questers may choose to take artifacts either for personal gain, or in the interest of spreading knowledge about the island. Alternatively, players who feel that the island should be able to keep its secrets, or feel that Archie has immoral intentions, may choose to leave the artifacts in the sand.

By providing a space for children to make choices based on their own beliefs about right and wrong, CryptoCoordinates allows them to personalize the narrative of the island and contribute their own perspective. It’s important to note that the space does not instruct students about “what is right,” but allows children to grapple with these moral questions on their own, determining what they individually feel is right or wrong. When a variety of characters and rules are presented (as in Crypto), there is no obvious right or wrong choice.

Rather than providing answers, games can offer narrative tensions and difficult questions so that individuals propel themselves forward by advancing a moral argument. Adding a moral tension into a narrative creates a path to the player’s own beliefs and intentionality. The player must exercise their intentions in order to progress within the game.

In games and in classrooms, asking questions in which there is no right answer opens up spaces for conversations that are often lost when the focus is simply on questions with a predetermined answer. We have seen that students exhibit a variety of beliefs and support their beliefs in many different ways, many unimagined by the designers. They often either elaborate on game elements (“What if there’s a curse? You might get your head chopped off!”) or real world elements (“What if it’s illegal?” or “I like my secrets to be left alone.”). They may instantly personalize the experience by judging an action or concept as right or wrong, and are empowered because their opinion cannot be deemed right or wrong. As a consequence, asking more difficult questions (questions without answers), in games or otherwise, may prove more motivating and engaging than questions without the same tensions and with existing answers.

Math World: Before and After

 Here at Quest Atlantis, progress runs two ways.  On the one hand, we constantly look forward, designing and prototyping new ideas on a daily basis.  Simultaneously, we’re also mindful of the work we’ve already done and the ways that it can be improved, often based on the feedback and experience of thousands of Questers who push our work in directions we never thought of.  This emphasis on the user experience – and adapting to it – is applied to everything we do, from missions and Quests, right down to the physical layout and aesthetic of each world.

Since its original construction in early 2008, the Ander City unit (technically named “Math World”) has undergone multiple evolutions, each time adding new Quests, plot elements, and missions…  and all the 3D components that go along with them.   As previously mentioned, this dynamic process is one of Quest Atlantis’ strengths, but at the same time, it presents a unique management challenge: that of tracking the ebb and flow of ideas and elements that go into a constantly evolving world, and attempting to streamline them.  With Math World, we decided to streamline through a complete overhaul of the physical environment, while keeping the most recent version of the narrative fully intact.

To that end, the first goal of the redesign  was to imbue Ander City with a “sense of place,” or a physical identity and history.  After reviewing the unit narrative, and its emphasis of issues of parks, baseball, and bicycles, I decided to evoke a small-town motif, and create a unified aesthetic that would evoke that response in players, without ever explicitly stating it.

After assembling a collage of reference photos, I was able to identify reoccurring patterns that would act as visual cues – things that seem to scream “small town.”  One-to-two story buildings.  Lots of brick. Old, white, wooden churches.  A bandstand in the park.  Brick everything.  A 200 year-old town hall.  Did I mention brick?

Another major aesthetic change was the introduction of the autumn season to the world – orange and yellow leaves, falling from the sky and settling on the ground.  While this was a relatively simple effect to achieve on a technical level, the result is a further enhancement of the mis-en-scene.  By introducing something as simple as falling leaves, we have created a climate and a time of year for Ander City, further enhancing the Election Day-based narrative.  Moreover, in the final version of Ander City, when players are able to see the effects of their choices, the seasons will have progressed:  the trees will be green, the leaf piles will be gone, and summer will be in full bloom, creating the sense that the players are participating in a dynamic world.

The Town Square

In addition to the visual enhancements, Math World underwent a number of structural improvements as well, most notably the relocation of the park to the center of the world.  As the fate of the town’s park is a major narrative point for Math World, it made sense to have it centrally located, so that the players would feel more invested in their decision.  Additionally, the park now serves as a central hub for players, creating a space for players to interact and discuss the challenges facing Ander City.

The third benefit of this centralized placement is that it allows users to quickly navigate their way around the town – the wide open space makes it easy to locate a player’s next objective, especially when coupled with distinct physical structures.  Just as omnipresent Cinderella’s Castle in Walt Disney World helps park guests orient themselves, we have included several unique buildings that are visible from any location in town –the church, the town hall, the diner—allowing efficient player movement (and making it easier for teachers to help students find their way!).

Finally, throughout the redesign process we were extremely conscious of ways to improve the performance of Quest Atlantis on student computers.  Due to the widely varying hardware configurations in schools around the world, we simply had to take our best shot at making Math World as resource efficient as possible.  While I’ll spare you the more mundane technical details of “vision limiters” and polygon counts, you may find it interesting to note how many of the buildings are simply flat fronts.

Math world: A unique view behind the scenes.

At the same time we were striving to create the illusion of a living, breathing town, we also were aware that it would be a huge waste of computational resources to actually build a complete town, so we did what Hollywood has been doing for years…  we cheated.  Borrowing a page from the production design adage “only build what the camera can see,” we’ve create a world where walls only extend halfway around the house, roofs are floating in midair, and trees “on the horizon” are actually 1/10^th scale models placed 20 feet away.   As a result, we’re able to achieve a 20 frames-per-second rate even without any hardware acceleration, which is nerd-speak for “hey!  It runs pretty smooth!”

I hope you’ve enjoyed this somewhat lengthy look behind the scenes of the upcoming Mathworld revision – if you’d like more of these types of design-specific write-ups, just let us know in the comment section below.  See you in Ander City!

Genetics is often touted as a complicated subject for most students. This is in part due to the fact that students are expected to understand the broad range of concepts over the span of one year. Firm in the belief that elementary students (specifically fourth graders and above) are capable of learning genetic concepts, the QA team designed a genetics unit. In the Drakos Dilemma unit, students are required to breed drakos, a species of Atlantian dragonfly, in order to combat the plague (Alas, it seems the Ingolstadt plague has found its way to Healthy!). This unit brings together concepts such as phenotype, genotype, dominant and recessive genes, and Punnett Square in an engaging and I dare say, fun way.

In order to breed drakos, students need to understand how the aforementioned concepts relate to one another and apply their knowledge of Punnett Squares in breeding drakos. Students are introduced to a variety of interesting characters, many of whom are best remembered due to their unique personalities.

Between the months of February and March, the Drakos Dilemma unit was introduced to two fourth-grade elementary schools in the Mid-west. Pre and post tests administered demonstrated significant gains for both classes. The results of the implementation indicated that students were indeed able to utilize the concepts effectively, while remaining immersed in the narrative. Students demonstrated a good understanding of how to use single trait Punnett Squares, while most struggle with the two-trait version.

Based on these results, a minor revision of the unit is underway in order to address the gaps in the current curriculum. This revision will include a more engaging narrative, one that we believe will provide students with the impetus to seek the knowledge that they require to achieve the intended goal of the unit. In addition to the teacher-directed unit, we will be releasing a multiplayer version of drakos – students can continue working with drakos once they are done with the classroom version of the Drakos Dilemma. This multiplayer version is less curriculum-focused, emphasizing more on cooperation and allowing more opportunities for play and col production.

Through these two implementations, it is evident that teachers are highly instrumental in fostering understanding of the curricular content. While this factor may seem obvious to many, this aspect is sometimes under-emphasized when educators and policy makers alike tout the benefits of technology in the classroom. Without teachers, the curriculum cannot be fully successful. The designed curriculum can only go so far; while students may very well learn the content, the presence of a teacher is vital is ensuring that students are critically engaged in their learning, engaging in meta-reflexivity of what is being learned. Our designs thus very much depend on our partners; the teachers who share the same vision of nurturing and enhancing the lives of children through personally relevant yet pedagogically sound experiences.

My first project was to ask my classmates if they wanted to stay in General Visibility in middle school or in Middle School visibility in Middle School. It was a very interesting experience finding out what my classmates thought. All of the students I surveyed wanted to stay in general visibility so they would not lose their lumins and cols. My classmates and I were succesful in convincing the teachers that kids should stay in General Visibility. All of my classmates were happy at the outcome.  Here is the link to my blog: Middle School Visibility vs General Visibility

The second project I did was the 2010 Earth Day Quest. Me and two other students had to come up with ideas for the quest. It was very hard because we had to make them find things in the core worlds and the Otak Hub. In those worlds, it is very hard to find things that help the Earth. We made the quest for 4+1 bonus lumin. Everyone who has done that quest so far is very happy. They feel that they are learning so much about the Earth and the Environment.

My third project was to teach Middle Schoolers about Quest Atlantis. It was very difficult because they thought that it was dumb that 4th graders were teaching them. But they didn’t realize what a hard time me and all of the other students have. They were reckless and they were not to excited to do it. I feel that because I don’t think they  have an open mind like the 4th graders. We as 4th graders enjoy Quest Atlantis because we like to explore and we have an open mind.

Right now in Student Congress, we are building areas for all of the different Social Commitments. I am the leader of the Environmental Awareness group. In my design group, we are trying to create a mission. The summary of the mission is that when you enter the area, you will find a mother polar bear and her cub. These bears will talk to you and say that the iceberg that they are standing on is the last one they could find. Also, they will mention that they cannot find food anymore . The bears see an Ecologist’s boat and ask if the avatar can go and ask them for help. The Ecologist tells the avatar to go into the town’s research lab and find out information about why the ice caps are melting. In the research lab, they talk to the main researcher.  The researcher gives the avatar  informational notes. The Avatar has to talk to different researchers to understand what the notes mean. When the Avatar talks to the last person, he/she has to go back to the main researcher and take a test. When they finish the test, then the researcher tells the Avatar to go back to the Ecologist. The Ecologist asks the Avatar what they learned. After they are done, they will earn a hat for finding out how the Ice Caps were melting. That is our design plan.

All in all, I think that being a student leader is a great honor and responsibility. I am having a great experience creating these blogs, quests, and teaching middle schoolers. I am learning a lot myself.

A new unit in Quest Atlantis hopes to provide answers to these questions and create a path towards pre-service teachers’ situated and contextualized learning. The unit consists of four missions that focus on cognitive development, learning theories, motivation, and assessment. The unit is currently offered as one of  IU’s undergraduate pre-service classes and is primarly available to teachers who are ready for their field experience. The key themes of providing agency, offering legitimate roles, and the illustrating opportunities to make a change in the world appear strongly throughout the whole experience, just as they do in our student experiences.

Learners enter the game as consultants in an educational evaluation company. The narrative involves a local school facing several dilemmas related toto ways of dealing with students and enhancing their participation, improving instruction and assessing learning. Eva, the boss at the Consulting Company, describes the situation, and then the consultants embark on a journey where they must interview experts, teachers, and students in the space, participate in online discussions, and play mini games that determine their trajectory. Teachers also develop a perspective which they adopt as they engage several key issues.

Throughout the unit teachers can reflect on the effectiveness of the instruction at the fictional school.  Students at this school appear unmotivated when the teacher assigns homework that is abstract or apart from what they know, and the students cannot get good grades on their tests because the knowledge they come across is de-contextualized. Further, teachers struggle as to which approach to adopt to meet the needs of their students. Such dilemmas create the need for investigation. This is where the consultant’s role becomes powerful. By talking to teachers about their practices and approaches and by talking to the students, they develop a greater insight into the atmosphere at the school. At the end of each mission, consultants are required to provide a report to their boss that includes recommendations to solve the dilemmas they encountered.

The results from these pre-service teacher’s test scores are currently being compared with the scores of those undergraduate students that took the same class last fall through Oncourse, the university’s online platform. There, the class was set up providing short cases that needed resolutions. In other words, the same content was taught in a different context. The score comparisons so far indicate several significant differences between the undergraduate students’ performance. The contextualization of the content in Quest Atlantis seems to be providing a coherent understanding of how theory can be reflected into practice, as well as how instructional decisions can impact learning.

Games can promote 21st century skills, such as multitasking, play, distributed cognition, networking, among others (see Jenkins white paper ). These “new media” literacy skills, social in nature, are based on traditional literacies such as writing. Today, self-sponsored writing and the universal authorship through digital network are  put writing as an essential skill to be developed and as an essential activity by which a huge amount of learning and reflection occurs. This is exactly what Taiga and its intensive writing  Quests are doing.  So if much of the learning in QA happens when kids write Quests, how can we get them to submit better Quests and then use the feedback they provide?

In the Taiga Water Quality Unit, the narrative follows the activities of different stakeholders in the park (loggers, indigenous community, fishing company), looking at the ways in which their practices may put the future of the park and its wildlife at risk.

Ranger Bartle asks the Questers, now positioned as Field Investigators, for help in figuring out why the fish population is declining in the park.  Through their series of missions, students propose a first solution to the problem and need to blame one of the groups inhabiting the park. With the help of a time machine, students can travel two years into the future to witness and experience the consequentiality of their previous decisions and submit a more nuanced solution that addresses the negative consequences of the first one.

After the completion of each of the five missions in Taiga, students write and submit a 50-100 word Quest. The writing of these Quests represent a crucial opportunity to help students enlist the scientific formalism underlying the narrative of Taiga. This process has been studied for several years, and we have used various strategies for supporting the inherent complexities of writing and the difficult process of drafting a scientific-like explanation.

During February-March 2010, one of our experienced teachers implemented Taiga with four sixth-grade classes.  Borrowing from the portfolio assessment literature, in particular the distinction between “working portfolio” and “presentation portfolio” and with insights from our other projects, we translated these ideas into the writing process in Taiga. We manipulated the Quest in terms of the distinction between the two kinds of portfolio and incorporated new Reflection Questions (RQs).  Two classes were told that they should respond to the goals of the Quests and to the new RQs, but that only the answers to the goals of the Quest would be reviewed by Ranger Bartle. For the other two classes the opposite instruction was given, i.e., the reflection questions would be looked at by Ranger Bartle.  We wanted to see if this would have an impact on the quality of  students’ initial submission to the Quest.

A second refinement we enacted was the incorporation of a wiki. Across the four classes and in an attempt to create a collaborative space to foster discussion among students around what was going on in Taiga, we replaced the individual field notebook with a group-based wiki.  In this wiki, students could organize the information collected from the NPCs (non-player characters) and discuss it within their groups. These two refinements reflect current trends in sociocultural approaches to assessment and collective oriented tools for fostering practices more akin to the ones occurring in real social networking spaces.

Even though this implementation had to deal with unexpected external difficulties that shortened the time that had been dedicated to Taiga in past implementations, we could see promising outcomes and future challenges related to the impact of focusing on the reflection questions and the incorporation of a collaborative oriented tool such as a wiki in the context of the rich narrative of Taiga.  It’s our hope that these changes may create  a broader learning environment that merges together the potentialities of both technologies.

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 3D Virtual Reality universe at Active Worlds, concentrating on the 3D world building aspect of that community but also building fine relationships with many users all over the world as well. For the seven years prior to my hiring at QA in 2005, this was a wonderfully fun and stimulating hobby for me and I never once realistically thought I could ever have a paying job doing it. Then, as I was making my final plans to retire at AT&T in January of 2005, I decided to look around for something to occupy my time. Through a serendipitous referral at an old, abandoned grad student 3D universe at Indiana University, I was put into contact with Sasha Barab at Quest Atlantis. A quick trip to Bloomington to show him my work online resulted in my job at QA.

Now I administer Quest Atlantis’ network of 3D worlds and provide local technical support and do R/D research for future versions of the software. I also manage QA’s Quester building world, QVille on a daily basis and field help questions from all of our young builders who acquire building lots there. How could it get better than that for an old, retired guy getting paid to play in his favorite hobby?

Over the years I’ve seen many interesting things happen in QVille world. Although the vast majority of Quester builders build quaint, cute builds on their lots, every so often a few come along that show immense promise. When that happens, I looked at the possibility of maybe retaining those students whose parents don’t mind them staying around in QA to help me out with future mission world building projects. Today, I have two very experienced and mature teen interns who help me build new worlds in QA. These two boys also work with me in my own personal 3D worlds online and are having a ball! One of them has even taken to using Truespace to create new and unique 3D objects for our use! It’s my hope that while my experience landed me a job working for an interesting project, that these experiences will also help these two young men use their skills in their career paths down the road.

~Enkar