Quest to Learn

Overview | School Principal Aaron Schwartz

More masterful in the world today than they were yesterday a generation of gamers has pointed the way toward a powerful new model for learning institutions of the future. New York City will hopefully soon be home to a new 6-12th grade public school that will use game design and game-inspired methods to teach critical 21st century skills and literacies. Proposed to open in fall 2009, the school is being created in collaboration with New Visions for Public Schools, a not-for-profit organization that works in partnership with the New York City Department of Education to improve academic achievement in the City's public schools. In addition, Quest to Learn will be supported through an innovative partnership with The Center for Transformative Media, at The New School, and Pearson. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently awarded a grant of $1.1 million to help with planning and development.

Background
Design and innovation are at the heart of Quest to Learn, a school committed to helping students to achieve excellence in the skills and literacies needed for career and college success in the 21st century. Mission critical at Quest to Learn(Quest) is a translation of the underlying form of games into a powerful pedagogical model for its 6-12th graders. Games work as rule-based learning systems, creating worlds in which players actively participate, use strategic thinking to make choices, solve complex problems, seek content knowledge, receive constant feedback, and consider the point of view of others. As is the case with many of the games played by young people today, Quest is designed to enable students to “take on” the identities and behaviors of explorers, mathematicians, historians, writers, and evolutionary biologists as they work through a dynamic, challenge-based curriculum with content-rich questing to learn at its core. It’s important to note that Quest is not a school whose curriculum is made up of the play of commercial videogames, but rather a school that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences. Games and other forms of digital media serve another useful purpose at Quest: they serve to exemplify the complexity and promise of “systems.” Understanding and accounting for this complexity is a fundamental literacy of the 21st century.

At Quest, the theme of “systems” is expressed in all aspects of the school’s design, from a standards-based integrated curriculum, to student support structures stressing the interconnectedness of academic, community, and youth development concerns. Academic standards provide the link between excellence and equity by setting consistently high, public expectations for every student, informed by an understanding of how students learn best. College and career opportunities are supported through an intern and apprenticeship model that allows students to engage in learning alongside experts starting in the 6th grade.

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