Week+5

=Quest Atlantis: Where Education and Gaming Live Together.= = = = = = =

Quest Atlantis (QA) is a 3D multi-user learning environment that students are using to immerse themselves in meaningful inquiry tasks. The project is unique in its goals to combine the best aspects of learning, playing, and helping, as a path to motivate and engage. It allows users to travel to virtual places to perform educational activities (known as Quests) and talk with other users and mentors. The project is intended to engage children ages 9–16 in a form of transformational play comprising both online and off-line learning activities, with a storyline inspiring a disposition towards social action.

QA combines strategies used in commercial gaming with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. QA fosters participation from students inside their structured team environment. This internet site blends education, entertainment, and social commitment.

In 1999, two high school students went on a murderous rampage at Columbine High Schoolin Colorado, leaving 12 students and a teacher dead and wounding 23 others before takingtheir own lives. This atrocity triggered unprecedented media attention, with many observers blaming gratuitous violence in video games asthe underlying problem. Others talked about bad parenting, insensitive schools, and themoral decay of our times as the ones to blame for this tragedy. Although many researchers have claimed that connection can be found between the use of videogames and violent behavior among youth, others insist that there may be a link between videogame 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.

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Completing quests requires that students participate in real-world, socially and academically meaningful activities, such as conducting environmental field studies, interviewing families and friends, researching community problems, examining current events from multiple perspectives, writing autobiographical anecdotes, producing advocacy media, or developing real-world action plans. Each quest is alsoconnected to local academic standards. Students can select a number of these quests, based on their interests or as assigned by their teacher if they are participating as part of a school.