Reading through my google reader today, I came across an article in the economist announcing a New York public school opening called ‘Quest to Learn.’ The publicly funded school for students from grade 6 to 12 was established on the research principles of Dr James Paul Gee who is at the forefront of exploring ‘What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.’ We here at Pop Lock and Learn would like to commend and congratulate this new school on breaking ground in this emerging educational field and will keep an close eye on their efforts. Below is an excerpt from the new schools website.
“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 model the complexity and promise of “systems.” Understanding and accounting for this complexity is a fundamental literacy of the 21st century.”
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