Voices of QA » transformational play

Vacationing in Quest Atlantis

jwatson — Tue, 03 May 2011 16:30:06 +0000

The major units of Quest Atlantis (Plague, Taiga, Mesa Verde, etc) are housed in special virtual worlds designed specifically for those experiences. Unfortunately, that means that only those students whose teachers assign the units get the chance to see those worlds. We always thought that was a shame, because those worlds are some of the most interesting virtual spaces we have in QA. But that is no longer a problem, because now we have invented the tourist month!

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?

Celebrating 2010

Bron Stuckey — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 21:23:19 +0000

In late December Quest Atlantis won the Edublog Award for Best Educational use of a Virtual World. This award was nominated for and voted by our teachers, so that now the world knows what we all know about Quest Atlantis: it really is the best! Of the 500 votes in this category Quest Atlantis received 224, making us head and shoulders above some very worthy contenders. This award was not just a recognition of the virtual world program but also of the teacher network that we have together developed. It recognises this blog, the Quest Atlantis Teaching Wiki, and all the teacher and student contributions on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Youtube . Our knowledge sharing community supports teachers about the globe in sharing strong pedagogoical practices, teaching hints and tips and amusing and poignant stories from the classroom.

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!

The (Fun) Work of Transformational Play: Shifting Mindsets one Family at a Time

Steve Zuiker — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:50:20 +0000

In our work with Quest Atlantis here in Singapore, my colleague Doreen and I repeatedly confront the pragmatic ambitions of a well-run, centrally-organized education system. It is therefore a pleasure for us when the things that kids say as they contribute to QA make us to step back for a moment. In this post, we share one such episode that occurred recently in the home of a not atypical local family. The video is not particularly long, but we think it highlights QA’s influence on the mindsets of both Singapore children and their parents. Before rolling the film, however, we think it is also important to share some of the tensions that QA must navigate in Singapore’s “schooling straits” and so we begin by setting up the video with a bit of background information.

It is safe to say that Singapore schools do not just work; they work quite well in accomplishing their stated objectives. While some people may recall that Singapore students perform well on international comparison studies in math and science, few are aware of the local efforts to improve not only conventional test scores but also the fundamental experience of learning. Singapore is perhaps most impressive not when you consider where its education system was or is, but when you consider how consistent the pace of change has been and how determined it is to continue. Of course, these accolades may lead you to believe that I am drinking the local water but, deferring to the long view, education leaders here are quick to acknowledge that the envisioned evolution of learning will not occur in a year or through a policy but rather by means of persistent, incremental shifts in education. They are not the first to think this way. For example, in his book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Michael Tomasello offers a kind of parallel idea about cultural shifts, be they in learning, business, art, or anything else. Tomasello characterizes change in terms of a “ratchet effect” and ratcheting up entails a blend of both continuity in some existing ways of doing things and transformations to other ways. In other words, rapid, wholesale change is a rare thing, it would seem. And so, it may be that educational shifts in Singapore are similarly envisioned to ratchet up over time.

But for an outsider like me, who arrived only two years ago, it feels sometimes that these shifts cannot happen fast enough. The profound and pervasive emphasis on testing often runs the risk of reducing the most complex of topics to a constellation of facts and figures. And it is this kind of approach that has led to distinctions between subject matter factoids that students memorize to get high scores and disciplinary practices that learners master in order to conceptualize and solve problems. By the same token, for some insiders here, people who might recall the birth of this relatively young nation, these shifts have perhaps been too fast. But, either way, it seems that everyone would agree that shifts in education are persistent and incremental. Singapore is moving, step by step, away from subject matter and towards disciplines. In fact, an appealing local mantra happens to be “teach less, learn more.” This clever turn of phrase (already engrained as TLLM) succinctly captures an aspiration; equally important, it also alludes to the kinds of self-directed and collaborative learning often observed as students use QA

What is most interesting to us in all of this background info, though, is the number of Singapore citizens who assume that it is the very central role that their government plays that propels and will continue to propel shifts in education. On one level, we agree. It is routinely the Singapore Ministry of Education that drives change through carefully crafted policy initiatives. At the same time, as kids voices in the video below reminded us, everyday moments of interaction in families plays an important role too. We think this episode highlights one way in which these shifts are propelled by Singapore students and, in other instances, by teachers too. And so, finally, now consider the brief exchange that this brother-sister duo have with their parents around whether or not QA is actually work.

Students from Singapore use QA.

Yes, it is just a brief moment. But yes, it is also one in which kids refuse to equate learning with QA and learning through typical homework from school. We think it is an inspiring, if not also powerful, example of the moments that can ratchet up to significant changes or shifts. Specifically, these siblings challenge the ways we often think about what it means to learn or work, and their relationships to playing. Research already suggests that when kids plug in to QA’s game-based learning framework, they encounter opportunities to learn through the idea of “transformational play”. This video illustrates that kids also create opportunities to plug QA into their parents’ mindsets by rethinking play and work. In this way, the exchange punctuates, perhaps even catalyzes, both the natural ratcheting effects of culture that Tomasello talks about and the perhaps more deliberate shifts in education that experiences with QA enable.