updates

Each week the curriculum team at Q2L puts out The Relay, a email newsletter that shares with parents the goings on in school that week. Below are excerpts from The Relay for the first three amazing weeks of Q2L's launch.

WEEK 1
September 9, 2009, was a very special day for Quest to Learn (Q2L) and its founding partner the Institute of Play! We opened Q2L's doors and the students came streaming in. They carried backpacks, summer projects, supply bags and hopes for what the first day of school would hold. Although there were many new faces, there were familiar ones as well, as Q2L welcomed many alumnae from the Institute of Play's Gaming SMALLab and Mobile Quest projects.

Q2L opened with a special curriculum designed to welcome the students to their new school and learning community. "Circle Up," "Break it Down," and "The Settlers" were the themes used to welcome the students and introduce them to the goals and guiding principles of the day. During these first three days, games, learning activities, domain classes and advisories were targeted to help students explore team-work, respect and discover the quirks and characteristics of the individuals who make up their new community.

The self-named "q-dents" created a Q2L team charter, a "smartool" to help learn one another's names and developed a very personal understanding of how individuals are components of systems and that systems have many interesting, interdependent components. The first three days ended with a bang, with students eating cake, trying on their new Q2L t-shirts in a celebration of their new school and its first week.

WEEK 2
It has been an exciting first full week of school at Q2L! Students continued to meet with their Home Base advisors daily, and we had morning meeting on Monday and Friday. During Monday’s morning meeting one of our students introduced the idea of a Q2L YouTube channel, and there was an overwhelming response from students – so much so that we are putting together a lunchtime club on two different days so that we can accommodate the large number of students who are interested. During Friday’s morning meeting we began our practice of a weekly silent meeting, which is a time for our community to come together and engage in self-reflection.

Students also spent their first full week in their domain classes, where their teachers introduced them to their first trimester’s missions. To read a summary from each teacher of what students have been working on for weeks two and three, click here.

The Being Me team continues its hard work and has recently turned its attention to developing the applications that will fuel the platform's in-game narrative. In Being Me, as students engage in quests to help save the flagging Wiedanru population, they unlock different applications whose features grant extra abilities to the community.

Here's a sneak peek into some of the applications that the team envisions...

Pixels are tiny bits of energy that are released when students perform actions on the site, such as logging in, commenting, or posting information. Each player's pixels are stored in a "bucket," and also in a communal "wells," where pixels can be collected, shared and "thrown" in order to maintain balance in the systems underlying the Wiedanru world.

The Expertise Exchange is a knowledge bank that represents the Quest to Learn community's skills and interests. The Expertise Exchange enables users to share expertise, and receive help in areas where they have a "need to know." Through the Expertise Exchange, students learn to: participate constructively in discussions about work, ideas and problems; respond to the requests of others; receive and incorporate feedback; assess the level of their own expertise; problem solve and identify resources to achieve specific learning goals.

The Monitor, is an application which tracks and displays the emotional states, balance of energy and level of expertise of the Q2L community. Students can use the monitor's data visualization features to decipher and diagnose what is happening with themselves as individuals, and explore how their individual "state" relates to those of the larger community.

The Moodtracker is a puzzle of different and often conflicting emoticons that students use to create their daily, socio-emotional self portrait. The Moodtracker allows students to track their emotional growth to help them recognize different mood patterns, over time.

Finally the Echospot is an online diary, a safe and private space for students to communicate with mentors and record a videos in response to specific prompts.

Related Link:
Bits and Bytes from the Being Me team

Last month, the SMALLab-NY team—Katie Salen, Mike Edwards, Kyle Li and Claudio Midolo created one of three GameBot pieces that were unveiled at the GameBot exhibition held at Arizona Science Center.

In the GameBot exhibition, humans and robots came together for interactive gameplay exploring the social, technological, and sustainable dimensions of robotics.

The New York team's entry 'Swarm!' challenged players with an other-worldly call to arms: "Chaos reigns in the dark reaches of the universe! Your spaceship has wandered into a hive of space hornets. Repel the angry insects with your energy."

All three gamebots were developed as part of SMALLab, the K-12 Embodied and Mediated Learning project at Arizona State University, and created through a collaborative effort between teams of artists, game designers and scientists from Arizona and beyond.

Creating a dystopian sci-fi narrative, designing game mechanics involving pixels and buckets and creating applications that allow students to track the activities of their peers, exchange expertise and amend the exquisite puzzle of their moods, are just a few of the applications that the Being Me team has been developing in support of Quest to Learn’s wellness-focused social network.

During the past month, the Being Me team has been designing a series of applications to support students in holistic work on issues related to socio-emotional, physiological and community development. The emphasis has been on empowering students to see themselves as integral parts of a larger community, helping them to understand, "I matter within this community and I contribute to its overall wellness and abilities."

Being Me’s game narrative fuels this journey of self-discovery. The narrative involves the kindhearted and industrious Wiedanrus, an endangered species who live on the planet Qetesh. Faced with their declining civilization and inevitable extinction, the Wiedanrus contact the Quest to Learn community to help them revive their once-thriving community. The story encourages students to form connections, work together, and to be reflective about their own lives and their roles in growing a healthy community. As the narrative unfolds, students participate in quests to support the Wiedanrus and unlock different applications along the way.

Sound exciting? Stay tuned for more updates soon!