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.

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.

The theme park in Taiga provides both content and game support to teachers.

Well, now you can!   We’ve recently introduced our PD theme parks, areas in Teacherville to help teachers experience an abridged version of the Unit while learning how to best support their students’ use of the curriculum.  Each theme park will allow teachers to try out a special Mission based on the Unit where they can learn about the narrative, the most consequential student moments, as well as gain insights into how to best support students in their understanding of the material.  Teachers can try the Unit on for size, literally, as they put on a  Native American outfit in Mesa Verde or try on the campaign hat in the statistics Unit.  How fun would it be to join your students in the 3D space wearing a Native American outfit as a teaser?  Seeing your teacher wearing a news reporter hat or a squash blossom necklace might be just the ticket to generating a little more excitement about an upcoming QA Unit.

Teachers can submit exemplary Quests to share with others

More importantly, teachers get a full understanding of the Unit in a VERY short time!   These new PD missions take only 20-30 minutes to experience, but are chock full of teacher tidbits, videos and content.  In the theme park itself, we’ve even added additional supports, such as teacher forums where teachers can share insights from their use of the curriculum, examples of exemplary Quests and other background materials to fully prepare you for teaching the Unit.  We encourage teachers to post on the forums or submit these example Quests — either Quests that were wonderful from the start, or Quests that became wonderful after feedback.  This is one way teachers can share their successes with others in the QA community, as well as develop an idea of what kind of work can result from these Units.

A short immersive experience…additional resources…community support…the price of this ticket could be extravagant, but you’ll be admitted for free upon entering Teacherville!  These theme parks are always open, and after jumping a board to take the ride, teachers may find themselves better prepared to support their students in their exploration of the curriculum. 

Cotton candy is optional.

This summer we are analyzing the classroom conversations that we’ve recorded in multiple classrooms around the United States, with the goal of understanding how game narratives can impact whole-class discussions. Our goal is to better understand how technology is integrated into classrooms. We’ve already observed lots of inspiring examples from teachers–here are a few tips that seem to make whole-class discussions especially effective:

Stay immersed in the narrative: It’s easy to pull back from the story to emphasize the important things that you want students to know and understand. We’ve found that when teachers discuss concepts while continuing to be immersed in the storyline, students’  interest and engagement is strengthened.

Stage a debate: Almost all the activities in Quest Atlantis involve some kind of unresolved issue. Frequently, those issues allow for more than one reasonable perspective. Capitalize on this tension and ask students to defend their perspectives–it’s amazing how impassioned students can get!

Target the big ideas: Allegiance to characters or interest in sub-plots can captivate students’ attention, true, but they are also the key to supporting students to grapple with important concepts. For example, in Taiga, students might find that they have sympathy for one particular group–like the indigenous farmers. Unfortunately, sympathy isn’t terribly persuasive; they need to be able to understand how other groups are contributing to the fish decline if they REALLY want to protect the farmers. So understanding the role of erosion on water quality, for example, is going to be key to effectively defending their position. Without deeply understanding the concepts, students may be ready to take action, but they will lack the tools they need to be effective.