Meanwhile, at a public school in NYC called Quest for Learning, the curriculum and learning strategies are based on video game design. Sixth- and seventh-graders are tackling problem-solving and higher thinking in the way that best engages them—through video gaming.
In a New York Times story, reporter Sara Corbett presents an in-depth look at the school, which was developed by Katie Salen, a professional game designer and Professor of Media Design at Parsons The New School for Design in New York. She is also Executive Director of the Institute of Play.
“There’s been this assumption that school is the only place that learning is happening, that everything a kid is supposed to know is delivered between 8 a.m. an 3 p.m. and it happens within the confines of a building,” said Salen. “But the fact is that kids are doing a lot of interesting learning outside of the school. We acknowledge that, and we are trying to bring that into their learning here.”
Go to the Quest to Learn Web site, and the first thing you find out is the school is a school for “digital kids” where the students learn to see the world as “different kinds of systems. It is a place to play, invent, grow, and explore.”
Students today are immersed in digital media and are often more techno-literate than the adults teaching and leading them. In their own homes, they live in a world where they can download, remix, videotape, share, upload, design their own characters, retool, and create. They are engaged, whereas often school is static. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation national survey, 60% of children 8-18 reported playing video games every day, for about two hours.
“Kids are literally wearing digital media,” said Michael H. Levine, Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which is part of Sesame Workshop and studies the role of digital technology in child literacy. “My view is that we will never get to the holy land in terms of educational performance unless we do something about the engagement factor.”
Students at Quest to Learn, a demonstration site for new technology-based instructional methods, take classes designed to teach how elements in a system interact, how systems work to meet goals, and the things that keep the systems balanced and sustained. “Systems thinking is a core 21st century skill, and a skill we believe is the key to good learning,” says the school Web site.
Nearly everything at Quest to Learn is set up like a video game, an environment where the students are familiar and comfortable. Games, no matter what the story line, are set up as a series of challenges and goals. Players tackle each challenge to gain points, “level up,” and ultimately beat the game. Unlike the high-stakes environment of school today, gaming is “failure-based learning,” as dubbed by Will Wright, designer of the Sims game series and Spore. Rather than give up, kids work at the games to master them.
Ntiedo Etuk, CEO of Tabula Digita, an educational computer games design company, says that kids play games over and over, failing each time until they ultimately win. “Failure in an academic environment is depressing. Failure in a video game is pleasant. It’s completely inspirational.”
Classes at Quest to Lean are called “domains,” offering standards-based content in multidisciplinary forms. Learning units are missions, and smaller quests making up the curriculum. Kids discuss how to solve problems in games; they watch games to record and chart strategy; and they design their own games, adjusting their systems to make them work optimally. In the school SMALLab, which Salen designed with media artist David Birchfield and Mina Glenberg-Johnson of Arizona State University, kids learn math, science, and wellness almost inside the game, which is projected around them. Birchfield calls the lab a “hybrid physical-digital space.”
“I think games are the future in education,” said Wright. “ We are going through a rapid transition right now. We’re about to leave print and textbooks behind.” Indeed, with the proliferation of e-readers and the birth of the iPad, more and more knowledge is techno-based.
Al Doyle, who has taught New York City school children for 32 years, primarily in art and computer graphics, leads the Sports for the Mind domain at Quest to Learn. He said that his role has become less a “teacher” than a “facilitator,” with learning the kids were doing outside the classroom as a foundation. “Ten years ago it would have taken a week to get kids to learn the difference between ‘save’ and ‘save as.’ Now I show them GarageBand (an Apple music mixing program) and five minutes later they’re recording and editing sound,” he said. “Game design is the platform that we can hook them into because this is where they live. Video games are more important to them than film, than broadcast television, than journalism. This is their medium. Games are this generation’s rock and roll.”
The article is based on the story by Sara Corbett in the New York Times, Sept. 15, 2010. To read the complete story about Quest to Learn, click here.
