It may not be the real world but, these days, you've got to meet students where they're at.
That, in a nutshell, is the thinking behind the new online educational game 3D Quest Atlantis, developed by researchers at Indiana University for kids nine to 16 years and championed by two teachers at Sir Frederick Banting middle school in Coquitlam.
On Wednesday, Cory Cleto and Meghan Enga made the case for the game to other School District 43 teachers and administrators in an attempt to encourage classrooms across the district and beyond to plug into the interactive online environment. To call Quest Atlantis a statistics game or a math or language game would be to miss the point. In fact, it's so immersive that it's best be described as practice for real life.
"What they are doing is meaningful in a broader context," Enga told The Tri-City News. "All of it is higher-level thinking and they have to use information they gather to make decisions that mimic real life."
For example, one recent game scenario whisked the avatars of Banting students off to the Mkomazi Game Reserve - real-life home of the rare black rhino - to try to settle a land dispute between residents and conservationists that has been raging in the real world for 60 years.Working with their classmates, and often with students in Asia, the United States and the United Kingdom, Enga and Cleto's Grade 6 and Grade 7 language and humanities students learn about perspective, mediation, math, morality, land use rights, global citizenship, responsibility to endangered animals and resource allocation.
At the end of each task, the students write essays describing all sides of the conflict, what they did to resolve it and why. Then the game propels them a few years into the future to see how their decisions impacted the world.
Besides fostering collaboration and the use of different skill sets to solve big problems, Quest Atlantis also teaches kids how to play safely on the 21st century playground, the Banting teachers said.
"We found that it's very monitored by the kids in the game," said Cleto. "If somebody were to use their last name, somebody else would be right there telling them not to."
As an added safety net, Cleto and Enga can also monitor what their students are saying, doing and learning in the game - either openly or without the students knowing - and researchers in Indiana also study the students on the network in real-time and can send email reports to any user's teacher immediately if there's a problem.
"The biggest draw for me is that we found a way to engage learners who were otherwise not engaged, particularly Grade 6/7 boys," Cleto said. She credited Quest Atlantis with bringing many hard-to-reach students out of their shells, translating into real confidence and participation in the real world of the classroom.
The Grade 6 and 7 students at Banting - one of only two B.C. schools using Quest Atlantis - are putting in about three to four hours a week on the program, depending on the availability of computers, Cleto said. But both Enga and Cleto admitted they and their students are logging hours of extra-curricular time on the game outside of class, learning and engaging with one another and having fun as they go.
"It's really fun," Enga said. "I'm a technophobe but I've been able to connect with teachers in Australia and... other parts of the United States and Canada."
tcoyne@tricitynews.com
