Quest for Learning - Marie Alcock

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and multiple routes to achieve status, all bound together by a common interest. For example, in John Hunter’s World Peace Game (http://worldpeacegame.org), students strategize and navigate complex challenges to help save the world. Through this process, students learn via deep conversation and experience the extended cycle of expertise’s frustration phase. Collectively, players examine alternate pathways to grow from that failure, increasing their problem-solving skills and abilities to ask higher-level-thinking questions (about strategy and resources). The comments sections on Minecraft YouTube videos are another example. They are replete with conversations and instructional videos between novices and experts—a perfect example of social, collaborative learning. In these kinds of spaces, novices try their skills. These affinity spaces are in stark comparison to classrooms, where students are at times afraid to ask questions or nervous to try something new. Questing helps foster technological and information literacy, which are crucial 21st century skills (Partnership for 21st Century Learning, n.d.).

      The quest’s goal is to have meaningful learning moments that grow expertise, not necessarily to produce experts in each quest. In fact, during a questing experience a learner may realize that he or she no longer enjoys the topic or field of study. This too can be very powerful learning, and the learning community can celebrate as deeply as when realizing a great passion and love for a topic.

      The remainder of this chapter explores three design options that are helpful in designing contemporary questing experiences. For each option—(1) question design, (2) game design, and (3) network design—we will provide a brief overview as well as make explicit connections to the tenets of engagement. Whether you are dipping your toe in the water or are a burgeoning expert in inquiry, gaming, or networking in affinity spaces, you will guide students toward options that are right for them and for your classroom during a quest. Students can participate in one or all of these designs depending on the amount of time you have and your resource range (such as technology, games, off-site visits, and the like). We explore each design—question, game, and network—more fully in chapter 3 (page 25), chapter 4 (page 35), and chapter 5 (page 51).

      Question Design Choices

      Regardless of topic or ultimate design decision, questions are necessary for all quests. Inquiry, which is the first learner engagement query and a design type, is the starting point for quests with game and network design. Inquiry leads to a quest because a learner must make choices that compel him or her to launch and navigate a quest. By nature, a learner is an inquirer, asking questions that require imagination, exploration, re-examination, and reworking.

      Questions help merge emotionally gripping topics with learning targets such as the following Common Core State Standards for mathematics and for English language arts (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices [NGA] & Chief State School Officers [CCSSO], 2010b, 2010c).

      * Write a meaningful argument (W.9–10.1).

      * Write a helpful informational piece (W.11–12.2.a).

      * Create charts to display data collected (3.MD.3).

      * Identify whether there is a correlation in data and describe the relationship between two variables (HSS.ID.B.6).

      * Design a model (HSG.MG.A.3).

      * Create a character (W.3.3).

      * Solve a problem with double-digit multiplication (4.NBT.B.5).

      We introduce four distinct but interrelated types of questions here, discuss each at length in chapter 3 (page 25), and flesh them out in chapter 8 (page 97).

      1. Essential questions promote inquiry in a topic, skill, or concept. The teacher designs these questions because the teacher knows what content and skills are most significant (and must be addressed) in the curriculum.

      2. Driving questions guide research, action, and creation. Inspired by essential questions, students generate driving questions. These questions optimize student ownership, help students establish the challenge, and aid in their mapping out an approach to inquiry. With these, the learner engages with relevant, worthy inquiries and experiences that are interesting or emotionally gripping.

      3. Probing questions deeply examine statements. Teachers can design these alone or co-create them with students to help examine assumptions based on evidence. Probing questions help students navigate learning goals and make sense of information or results.

      4. Reflection questions encourage deep thinking about what the student learned and its impact on him or her. These questions help students during deliverable development, guiding revisions as well as monitoring how they feel about their process and progress.

      Table 2.1 links the question types to the tenets of engagement.

       Table 2.1: Question Design Connections to Tenets of Engagement

Design Connections Engagement Tenet
The teacher designs essential questions to begin a student’s quest. The student drafts a series of driving questions to guide his or her inquiry process. The learner engages with relevant, worthy inquiries and experiences that are interesting or emotionally gripping.
The teacher uses probing questions for the student to actively consider, guiding the extended cycle of expertise as the student develops patterns, solutions, prototypes, and creations. This may lead to new or nuanced driving questions. The learner engages in an active, intentional cycle with clear goals and right-sized, actionable steps.
The student connects to others through a shared interest in specific questions, topics, or creation examination. As students share their thinking and development, reflection questions guide revisions. The learner engages in social, collaborative opportunities that grow expertise.

      Chapter 3 focuses both on inquiry development and the spaces where learners can pursue those questions.

      Game Design Choices

      Game design encourages students to learn while playing or designing a game. Neither learners nor teachers need to be fluent in the art of game design. Both can choose game design and its options without a background in game design. Good questing games are those that are challenging enough to be fun, but effectively teach content and skills so players do not quit when the game challenges them further. There is a balance between a task’s challenge and the support provided to prepare players to accomplish that task or collection of tasks; that is known as reaching a win state (a phrase the gaming community employs to explain how to win any game that has more than one way to win). The same is true for quests—there is more than one way to move forward.

      Different kinds of computer languages, such as Visual Basic, have evolved from BASIC. Visit Code.org (www.code.org) if you’re interested in learning more. (Visit go.Solution Tree.com/instruction for live links to the websites mentioned in this book.) Chapter 4 (page 35) further explains game options, when learners make the following choices.

      * The type of game that fits best for the desired learning: cooperative, competitive, or simulation

      * Whether the learner will

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