Learning by Playing/ how does game based curriculum look like

Starting to blog again has probably been on my top 10 list of ’ Things I say I’ll do this weekend but never do’,  right behind ’ i will start making my own homemade ice-cream’. Well, here i am in front of my laptop on a perfect - for writing purposes- cloudy Sunday with a cup of coffee next to me, just to keep me on task.

With our school Quest to Learn being on the cover page of the NYT magazine this past weekend in an article called ‘Learning by Playing’ (the whole issue was devoted to education and is definitely worth reading, if you haven’t already ) I thought i would start by talking in detail from a designer’s point of view about a curriculum piece that  we designed last year and that was mentioned in the article, the infamous ‘Creepytown’.

Let’s start with a short intro to how curriculum is structured at Quest to Learn, in a nutshell; at the beginning of each trimester students are introduced to what we call a ‘Mission’. A ’ Mission’, which lasts a whole trimester, is broken down to smaller ‘Quests’ that can last from a few days to a couple of weeks. This ‘Mission and Quest’  framework introduces the students with a game-like scenario. The scenario requires that the students take on an identity, overcome a set of challenges and meet some very very clear goals. The ‘Mission’ narrative also creates what we call ’ a need to know’,  a situation were there is a demand to learn a certain piece of knowledge such as fractions and decimals or how to use a camera, in order to overcome the Mission’s challenges and complete the goal.

Following the above framework we designed the ‘Creepytown’ Mission for the Codeworlds domain. To give you a bit of background, a ‘domain’ correlates to what in a traditional school would be perceived as a ‘class’. At Quest to Learn we have integrated domains, as such- the Codeworlds domain is a ‘Math and ELA’ one.

So, back to Creepytown. At the beginning of the trimester students in the ‘Codeworlds’ class are introduced to a rather unusual academy, founded by the twin brothers Arithmus and Wordix. The academy is located in the dark and gloomy mountains of Creepytown.

During their ’ Mission’, students will take on the roles of apprentice code-breakers in the academy in order to solve a mystery that entails deciphering a series of coded messages. All the messages are comprised by math and ELA content, creating  as a result a very clear ‘need to know’ math and ELA content, in order to solve the codes and as a result the mystery. Just to clarify here, the students are not in front of a computer screen when this is happening and there is no complicated videogame setup in the classroom. The above scenario is communicated to the students through their (amazing) teacher Alicia and a set of illustrations.

So, once the students are introduced to their Mission they have to complete their first ‘Quest’.  As I mentioned earlier a ‘Quest’ might last a few days or a couple of weeks. For the sake of keeping this as short as possible, we will go through the first and last Quest of this Mission to give you a better understanding.

In the first Quest students get assigned their case. The story involves a professor (Prof Pie) that used his mathematical skills to make a recipe for the perfect pie. Days before the annual pie competition, the professor is reported missing. There is evidence that one of his rivals in the competition has kidnapped him. There are six suspects all of whom claim to be innocent.  It is believed that the kidnapper will use the professor’s skills to replicate the perfect pie recipe and win the competition. Among the evidence is also a weird looking machine. In their first Quest, students will find out that if they use the machine to scan books from the professor’s library, a secret math code will appear on their screen. Solving the code will get them closer to finding out who is the kidnapper.

The ‘machine’ was put together by Tracy Gromek and myself in a simple fun physical computing project that triggers RGB Leds to flash each time someone pushes an oversized button on the top of the machine box. The above process is followed by many ‘ooos’ and ‘aaas’ by the students and an image of the code appearing on the teacher’s computer screen (we used processing for that part) . The image of the code could be different every week, depending on the assessment . In the one shown below, students need to know how to add fractions in order to solve the code. So it makes sense to them that this week they will be learning all about fractions.

This Mission had approximately five quests, all of them following this very modular structure where the teacher creates codes that reflect the content and skills that she needs to teach.

The final culminating quest had the kids firstly recreate Prof. Pie’s recipe by using their fraction addition and subtraction skills. In the picture below they are working in teams to complete all the steps of the recipe. Raku, Clyde, Dante and Luna are mixing the part that requires them adding six quarters of ooey gooey monkey brains to twelve fifths of dragon milk, hence the reaction in the photo below.

After this first part, the students have to work as a class and compare their pie to the pies made by the rest of the suspects, through solving a series of word problems, such as the one below;
Kalc threw in the mix one rabid monkey brain and so did Mori. Klaus threw in his mix as many brains as the bats he had thrown earlier. Napoleon threw in his pie mix half of what Klaus had thrown. Daphne used three sixths of how much Kalc had used plus four eighths of how much Olafur had used. Olafur used half the portion of brains that Kalc used plus half the portion of brains that Mori used.
At the end, the students had to work together to fill in an elimination table and find out who did it.

The Creepytown frenzy carried on the rest of our first year with the students building a Rollercoaster park at Creepytown when they were learning about geometry and creating their own itineraries for a trip around the world, organized by Creepytown’s own travel agent ~ Marla, when they were learning about percentage and statistics.

The whole curriculum process involves an ongoing collaboration with the teacher, curriculum directors and the game designers but it is important to understand that it lays upon simple premises such as creating meaningful experiences and making school relevant to the culture of youth.

Anyway, hope this gave a bit of insight in what exactly it entails to design game based curriculum and how it might look :)