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Katie Salen, Executive Director of the Institute of Play, was interviewed during a two-day event held at the Carnegie Foundation in March 2009. In her interview she talks about Quest to Learn, a new public 6th to 12th grade school in New York City that is being designed from ground up "around a pedagogy called game-like learning."

Quest to Learn from carnegie commons on Vimeo.

The Carnegie Commons, developed by the Knowledge Media Laboratory of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, is an intellectual community space provided to enrich and encourage exchange of knowledge about teaching and learning...More

The New York Post article, School is all Play, introduces Quest to Learn as, "A first-of-its-kind Manhattan public school that will use video games to engage kids in learning the basics of math, reading and science." The article highlights that role-playing will be a key technique for exploring subjects such as history, and that students will create and share their work through the regular use of digital media such as blogs, video chat and a custom-made social networking site. "This is the first school that philosophically is looking at the structure of games as a kind of learning model," says Katie Salen, Executive Director of the Institute of Play and a founder of the school.

During a recent interview on Minnesota Public Radio, Executive Director of Institute of Play, Katie Salen, discussed in greater detail what games have to offer education. Describing how kids learn through playing games, and how these lessons can be translated into a standards-based curriculum, Salen notes that games allow kids to "take on" identities, do complex problem solving, and often work in collaborative ways that hone crucial 21st Century skills and literacies. Salen explains how games create an environment with clear goals and feedback, allowing players to experiment, try new things and learn as they need to or "just in time." So in completing the game, kids have learned everything the game has to teach them. The school is being designed to support this kind of immersive game-like learning where traditional curricula will be taught using a mission and quest structure with each quest setup to equip kids with specific knowledge, skills and tools leading them towards solving that final quest.

In the article, Students, put down those pencils and pick up joysticks, Michael Levine, Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, talks about how "the U.S. has fallen behind in promoting the mastery of interactive tools that promote literacy; science and technology, and creativity." He suggests that in order to be the lead again, we need to let go of the old belief that video games are distractions, and acknowledge the research that has shown that "interactive game play is among the most powerful drivers for learning the skills children need for 21st century success." In this context, he points to our new school Quest to Learn, as an example of a school that plans to use game design principles to create engaging learning experiences for students. As Levine passionately argues, "We have a choice: Fight the tide by grousing about how pervasive video games are, or build upon the many beneficial ways they're rewiring the way kids think and engage the world."

Read more recent press about the new school Quest to Learn and its founding partner the Institute of Play.

Gaming SMALLab recently conducted three-consecutive workshop sessions at the campus of Parsons, The New School for Design. Participants were students belonging to grades 6-8 from various schools in New York. Working in small teams with teachers and designers, the students participated in interactive learning scenarios focused on light and optics, mapping, and language development. The students were able to play various roles during this workshop in SMALLab, for instance, they become scientists and technology specialists as they explored the space and investigated how the system worked based on observation and interaction with SMALLab objects and games. Throughout the workshop the students used the scientific method to propose and test theories, observe and gather evidence of outcome, and apply this understanding throughout the development of new theories.

See some photos and read more about Gaming SMALLab.

On Monday December 15, 2008, the Institute of Play visited the Fieldston Lower School. At Fieldston, educational technologist Charles Vergara’s after school class of junior game designers were faced with the semester's ultimate challenge—a jury of professional game designers! The students, ranging from the third to the fifth grade, presented their games to a discerning panel of experts, including, members of Gamestar Mechanic’s design team, Greg Trefry, Charles Amis and Scott Price, and the Institute of Play’s Chloe Varelidi.

The class has been beta-testing Gamestar Mechanic, an online multiplayer world in which players both play and edit games, currently in development by Gamelab. Throughout the semester, the class’s science-driven curriculum has drawn parallels between game systems and ecosystems, studying short clips from the video Planet Earth to better understand complex game design ideas—such as "game mechanic" and "space"—as they appear in our natural surroundings.