I first encountered Quest Atlantis, or QA as most call it, at the GLS conference two years ago. Sasha ran a mini workshop on it and we all got to have a wee taste. I recall being on a mission to figure out why the downstream part of the river was polluted. I wandered a 3-D virtual world and interacted with NPCs who had info relevant to the problem. Unlike, say, World of Warcraft, this wasn't about just going somewhere to do or get something and then check back with the quest giver. I recall my table group had to weigh evidence from a variety of sources to draw our own conclusion about what was going on. In that sense, an active learning experience was there to be had.
Now nearly three years later, I am training up on what has become a much larger, more fully implemented, virtual world. THere are trading cards, novels, and multiple ways of engaging with the environmnet. So far, I have experienced the content as king, and the virtual world as a stage upon which to engage in problem based learning activity. That is, I have not yet seen the science or society & technology content as embodied in the game. Oddly, I keep thinking back to the workshop at GLS where at least the problem was an in-game virtual world problem. Now it is very likely that this is a matter of time, and that as a beginner in the game I have not yet been offered those sorts of experiences. I reserve my judgment accordingly, but I am curious about whether and how the world itself will come to be an integral component of the content.
I guess as a TV gen. person, I think of content in virtual "learning" worlds the way Gumby and Pokey experienced it: walking into a book. In some ways, their experience was better integrated. Here's a quote from Art Clokey on Gumby's Trip to the Moon: "Well, you know, the spaceship had four modules on spokes like a wheel. The fifth module, that is the central module, was spherical. The idea was that they would rotate in space and create artificial gravity with centrifugal force. I studied physics and chemistry and so on. I taught chemistry and physics in high school at one time. So I had the knowledge at that time, in 1956." The content was IN the world, a part of the world. The world was not a backdrop for conducting education materials, it embodied the ideas themselves.
Also, the QA world raises some interesting problems for the notion of VR world design for education. The graphics are admirable, but chunky and old style active worlds stuff. If most kids are in touch with designs for consoles and for games such as World of Warcraft, QA looks downright funky and old. The avatar idling behavior cycles so often and is so annoying, it makes me wonder if the world is full of fleas. THese people are constantly picking at their clothes. Anyhow.. that last remark is really petty except as a marker of the problem. WoW and console games can afford the investment in art design because of the size of the customer base. Will educational games ever be able to afford the grandeur of a real virtual world game? And if not, won't they always seem funky, dated, and well, boring, even before the kids get into them? This is a real problem. However, we know text book publishers make a pretty penny off the text book market. Why couldn't a massive world game, if it could scale the entire curriculum of a grade level subject matter, pull down the same revenue? Can a Quest Atlantis stand in for the entire 5th grade science curriculum, usurping the textbook? That's a big burden to place on the developers, or is it.
"Why couldn't a massive world game, if it could scale the entire curriculum of a grade level subject matter, pull down the same revenue?"
ReplyDeleteI think it can . . . and will. We just have to disguise the 'learning' from the learners.