Teacher Institute (Summer 2008)

Overview
The Institute of Play has just concluded a month-long Summer Teachers' Institute with a small group of 6th and 7th grade New York City teachers. During the workshop the teachers collaborated with game designers and curriculum specialists on work with the game-based pedagogy that is at the heart of Quest to Learn. The workshops emphasized challenge-based problem-solving scenarios in the form of discovery "quests" and helped teachers develop Units that enabled students to "take on" identities as part of their data-seeking quests. Operating as a learning lab for understanding the promises and limitations of a game-like instructional model, the teams developed a set of core curricula, games, and toolkits that will be piloted in the teachers’ schools this Fall.

The Blubonian Treasure Hunt
Teacher: Janet Cappadona
Class: Spanish
School: East Side Middle School

Janet's Summer Teacher's Institute collaboration resulted in a fun and engaging unit entitled, "The Blubonian Treasure Hunt." Designed for Janet's 6th grade Introduction to Spanish class, the goal of this content-rich Unit is to help students become more comfortable communicating in Spanish and to assess their burgeoning vocabulary and conversation skills. Janet's interest in having students understand that Spanish has a distinct set of sounds and rules, led to the creation of a series of linked quests driven by a series of mysterious artifacts sent to the students by exiled athletes from outer space. Receiving a call to action from outer space encourages students to take on the identities of translators and teachers as they take responsibility for helping athletes from the planet Blublonia find a treasure hidden somewhere in a Spanish speaking country. For Janet and her students, the Institute of Play created two components—a customized online dictionary that students populate themselves and use as a reference tool throughout the year, and a system of Mission Letters and blog posts that allow students to communicate with the Blubonians through blog posts, YouTube videos, physical objects and audio recordings.
Download Mission Brief (11.4mb pdf)

Writers of the Digital Roundtable
Teacher: Ayesha Randolph
Class: English and Creative Writing
School: Calhoun School


Writers of the Digital Roundtable enables Ayesha Randolph's 7th grade Creative Writing students to "take on" the identities of 21st Century Writers, or authors who know how to integrate the written word with digital media components. In order to help Ayesha's student's understand that all "good stories" are made up of basic literary elements—plot points, characters, beginnings, middles and ends—the game designers and curriculum specialists at the Institute of Play designed a toolkit of story-generating games and multimedia authoring tools in collaboration with Ayesha. These story-based tools are designed to help students gain practice in storytelling, story structure, reflection, and critique, and are designed for use by individual students and in small groups. In addition, the unit challenges students to work with a range of media tools, from machinima, to digital comics, to multimedia authoring platforms like iWorks’ Pages. Writers of the Digital Roundtable culminates in a pitch session to a literary agent and the creation of a commercial or film trailer that introduces the basic story elements to the world-at-large. Download Mission Brief (979mb pdf)

Man vs Nature
Teachers: Michael Feder, Evan Klein, Melissa Nathan
Class: Humanities
School: East Side Middle School


In this unit, Evan, Michael and Melissa wanted their students to discover connecting patterns between physical geography and human geography, and how those patterns influenced the development of an ancient civilization, Mesopotamia. In response, they created a Unit that cast their students in the roles of geographers and anthropologists grappling with the birth of a civilization. Students engage in a complex quest to collect and analyze five core elements of physical geography. Once this basic inventory of elements has been built students enter a second quest to reveal another set of elements vital to the formation of civilizations—the core elements of human geography, like shelter, security, movement, and trade. All of the elements collected from each phase of the quests are captured on “resource cards,” designed by game designers at the Institute of Play. A series of short and varied, "mini-games" and rule sets accompany the cards and are used throughout the unit to introduce new concepts and assess comprehension. The unit culminates in a competition that use the geography cards and Sid Meier’s video game Civilization IV, to challenge students to create the most secure, prosperous, technologically advanced and culturally rich civilization, with the most contented citizenry. Download Mission Brief (7.7mb pdf)