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This summer, the Institute of Play's free, week-long summer camp, Mobile Quest, worked extensively with the authoring platform 7scenes. For a camp focused on introducing sixth graders to fundamental game design concepts through the use of smartphones—7scenes provided a fun and user-friendly solution. By the end of the week both campers, game designers and parents were impressed by its feature set. During Mobile Quest, kids make and play games, learn about smartphones as game design tools and put their smarts and smartphones to the test.

Encouraging campers to see the world as their game space, 7scenes created an excellent opportunity to introduce campers to mobile games that kept them both physically active and socially engaged. This summer's focus on the concepts of game space (the area of play) and core mechanics (the player's actions) were also conducive to a location-based authoring tool like 7scenes.

The Institute of Play and a dedicated team has just completed the development of the Spring trimester's Boss Level. Inspired by the Boss Level of a video game, the climatic moment when a player uses all of his/her newly mastered skills to challenge the "boss" and all of its powers., Designed as an assessment tool to help determine how students have understood the fundamental ideas and themes that have defined the trimester. Although students do not engage in battle during the Q2L Boss Levels, students are placed in problem-rich environment and challenged to work together, analyze findings, build theories and propose solutions.

This trimester, seven groups of students were delivered a three-part challenge: to create an event, build a balanced team to participate in each event and to compete and win at the first Q2L Field Day! The students began the Boss Level practicing related skills and grappling with their design constraints—specific materials and physical actions, particular qualities or characteristics that the event should test. Students were also tasked with creating a tool that would measure their specific quality whether it was agility, brain power or strength.

For the past week, the Quest to Learn community has been participating in "boss levels," a concept inspired by video game boss levels in which players harness hard-won tools and skills to face an epic challenge. At Q2L, boss levels are a two-week intensive period in which students and teachers work collaboratively on a capstone project that integrates the skills, content, resources and experiences acquired during the previous 10 weeks of the trimester.

Building on the trimester's focus on the relationships between the different elements of a system, the inaugural boss level challenge is for students to build Rube Goldberg machines or complicated machines that accomplish simple tasks. Each team of 8-10 students is charged with building a different machine that will be judged according to their performance, appearance, creativity and use of materials. Some of the assignments include creating a machine to: feed a turtle, turn off a light switch, press play on a CD player, turn on a faucet, hit the spacebar on a keyboard and turn on a power strip. While students build in small teams each morning, in the afternoons they reflect on their practice—writing scripts, documenting their work, and creating video podcasts.

To see and hear the daily reports from the frontlines of the Q2L boss levels, check-out our archive or subscribe to the Quest to Learn (Q2L) Boss Level podcast!

The third, and final, Super Art + Design Challenge was waged by fashion designer and fairytalefashion.org founder, Diana Eng. Diana descended on Q2L with lights, construction paper and a photo back-drop for her "Superhero Costume Design using Crazy-Cool Paper-Folding Techniques" workshop. After showing students examples from her fashion collection and her weekly online research videos, Diana launched into the intricacies of paper-folding and the importance of paper prototyping. After explaining that deployable structures were constructions that change easily, students brainstormed and came up with some ideas for some wearable deployable items.