Content area
Full Text
This article describes the Quest Atlantis (QA) project, a learning and teaching project that employs a multiuser, virtual environment to immerse children, ages 9-12, in educational tasks. QA combines strategies used in commercial gaming environments with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. It allows users at participating elementary schools and after-school centers to travel through virtual spaces to perform educational activities, talk with other users and mentors, and build virtual personae. Our work has involved an agenda and process that may be called socially-responsive design, which involves building sociotechnical structures that engage with and potentially transform individuals and their contexts of participation. This work sits at the intersection of education, entertainment, and social commitment and suggests an expansive focus for instructional designers. The focus is on engaging classroom culture and relevant aspects of student life to inspire participation consistent with social commitments and educational goals interpreted locally.
In 1999, two high school students went on a murderous rampage at Columbine High School in Colorado, leaving 12 students and a teacher dead and wounding 23 others before taking their own lives. This atrocity triggered unprecedented media attention, with many observers blaming gratuitous violence in video games as the underlying problem, and others suggesting bad parenting, insensitive schools, and the moral decay of our times. Although many researchers have claimed that no cogent connection can be found between the use of video games and violent behavior among youth, others insist that there may be a link between video game use and deviant social behavior (Provenzo, 1991, 1992). On the other hand, some advocates of game-based learning suggest that educational video games are the only way that educators can adequately engage the "video game generation" (Katz, 2000; Prensky, 2000). The need to design educational video games represents more than an attempt to harness their tremendous motivational power: Digital multimedia provide a resource for children to develop a sense of autonomy and an awareness of consequentiality. Jenkins (cited in Laurel, 2002) suggested that children today have fewer means for expressing agency, and even fewer opportunities for engaging in play, than they have had in the past. Their physical space for exploration and play has been reduced from several square miles to an electronic screen. Squire (2002),...