Making Learning Fun: Quest Atlantis, A Game Without · PDF fileMaking Learning Fun: Quest...

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Making Learning Fun: Quest Atlantis, A Game Without Guns Sasha Barab Michael Thomas Tyler Dodge Robert Carteaux Hakan Tuzun This article describes the Quest Atlantis (QA) project, a learning and teaching project that employs a multiuser, virtual environment to immerse children, ages 9–12, in educational tasks. QA combines strategies used in commercial gaming environments with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. It allows users at participating elementary schools and after-school centers to travel through virtual spaces to perform educational activities, talk with other users and mentors, and build virtual personae. Our work has involved an agenda and process that may be called socially-responsive design, which involves building sociotechnical structures that engage with and potentially transform individuals and their contexts of participation. This work sits at the intersection of education, entertainment, and social commitment and suggests an expansive focus for instructional designers. The focus is on engaging classroom culture and relevant aspects of student life to inspire participation consistent with social commitments and educational goals interpreted locally. In 1999, two high school students went on a murderous rampage at Columbine High School in Colorado, leaving 12 students and a teacher dead and wounding 23 others before taking their own lives. This atrocity triggered unprece- dented media attention, with many observers blaming gratuitous violence in video games as the underlying problem, and others suggesting bad parenting, insensitive schools, and the moral decay of our times. Although many researchers have claimed that no cogent connec- tion can be found between the use of video games and violent behavior among youth, oth- ers insist that there may be a link between video game use and deviant social behavior (Pro- venzo, 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 multi- media provide a resource for children to develop a sense of autonomy and an awareness of consequentiality. Jenkins (cited in Laurel, 2002) suggested that children today have fewer means for expressing agency, and even fewer opportunities for engaging in play, than they have had in the past. Their physical space for exploration and play has been reduced from several square miles to an electronic screen. Squire (2002), commenting on the cultural per- spective of video games, stated, 86 ETR&D, Vol. 53, No. 1, 2005, pp. 86–107 ISSN 1042–1629

Transcript of Making Learning Fun: Quest Atlantis, A Game Without · PDF fileMaking Learning Fun: Quest...

Making Learning Fun: Quest Atlantis, A Game Without Guns

Sasha BarabMichael ThomasTyler DodgeRobert CarteauxHakan Tuzun

This article describes the Quest Atlantis (QA)project, a learning and teaching project thatemploys a multiuser, virtual environment toimmerse children, ages 9–12, in educationaltasks. QA combines strategies used incommercial gaming environments with lessonsfrom educational research on learning andmotivation. It allows users at participatingelementary schools and after-school centers totravel through virtual spaces to performeducational activities, talk with other usersand mentors, and build virtual personae. Ourwork has involved an agenda and process thatmay be called socially-responsive design,which involves building sociotechnicalstructures that engage with and potentiallytransform individuals and their contexts ofparticipation. This work sits at the intersectionof education, entertainment, and socialcommitment and suggests an expansive focusfor instructional designers. The focus is onengaging classroom culture and relevantaspects of student life to inspire participationconsistent with social commitments andeducational goals interpreted locally.

In 1999, two high school students went on amurderous rampage at Columbine High Schoolin Colorado, leaving 12 students and a teacherdead and wounding 23 others before takingtheir own lives. This atrocity triggered unprece-dented media attention, with many observersblaming gratuitous violence in video games asthe underlying problem, and others suggestingbad parenting, insensitive schools, and themoral decay of our times. Although manyresearchers have claimed that no cogent connec-tion can be found between the use of videogames and violent behavior among youth, oth-ers insist that there may be a link between videogame use and deviant social behavior (Pro-venzo, 1991, 1992). On the other hand, someadvocates of game-based learning suggest thateducational video games are the only way thateducators can adequately engage the “videogame generation” (Katz, 2000; Prensky, 2000).The need to design educational video gamesrepresents more than an attempt to harness theirtremendous motivational power: Digital multi-media provide a resource for children todevelop a sense of autonomy and an awarenessof consequentiality. Jenkins (cited in Laurel,2002) suggested that children today have fewermeans for expressing agency, and even feweropportunities for engaging in play, than theyhave had in the past. Their physical space forexploration and play has been reduced fromseveral square miles to an electronic screen.Squire (2002), commenting on the cultural per-spective of video games, stated,

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In the United States, this fear and fascination goes backto the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan extolled thevirtues of games to create a generation of highly skilledCold War warriors, while U.S. Surgeon General C.Everett Koop proclaimed games among the top healthrisks facing Americans. (p. 1)

Rather than either blindly embracing videogames or impulsively brushing them aside, ourwork involved developing a technological inno-vation that lies at the intersection of education,entertainment, and a commitment to improvethe world (Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Squire, &Newell, in press; Barab et al., 2002). Our goal hasbeen to develop a technology-rich game withoutguns that teaches and informs, where the excite-ment is about learning, growth and the develop-ment of a sense of wonder.

Over the past two years, our researchers havepassed time in the same places that youths do,including carrying out an 18-month ethno-graphic study at a local Boys and Girls Club, vis-iting schools, reading teen and pop-culturemagazines, and even playing video games inarcades. We began with a simple goal: Let’smake learning fun. As we talked with children,parents, and others in our community, our inter-est expanded beyond supporting content learn-ing and developed into a broader socialcommitment. To achieve these goals throughdeliberate steps, we had to step away from ourcomputers, put aside our desire to design, andinstead engage the ethnographic process ofunderstanding the lives of those we wished toserve (Barab, Thomas et al., in press; Levinson,1998). Two years into the process, our experi-ences and commitments have distilled into asocially responsive design that is fun and educa-tional and that engages children in importantpersonal, social, ethical, and environmentalissues. This innovation, Quest Atlantis (QA), hasbeen implemented at multiple sites in the UnitedStates and around the world, with hundreds ofusers at dozens of elementary school classroomsand two after-school sites in the United States,and multiple classrooms in Australia, Denmark,Singapore, and Malaysia. QA was released inbeta form on January 15, 2003, and within lessthan a year, more than 3,000 participants regis-tered and completed thousands of quests—engaging curricular tasks that are connected to

academic standards and our social commit-ments.

QA is more than a technology, or even amultiuser virtual environment. At its core theQA experience centers around an intersubjectiveconnection or identification with the narrative ofAtlantis about a world in trouble. In establishingthis immersive narrative, QA leverages a 3-Dmultiuser environment, educational quests, unitplans, comic books, a novel, a board game, trad-ing cards, a series of social commitments, vari-ous characters, ways of behaving, and otherparticipant resources that collectively constituteQA. As such, QA is an example of a distributed,transmedia narrative, referring to the fact thatthe story line does not reside in one location or inone form of medium but is spread across variousmedia that come together and are given mean-ing as the user participates in the fictional gamecontext and investigates relevant personalissues. Participation in QA entails a personaland social engagement with the narrative, aschildren are asked to contribute experiences,ideas, and information to the activists of Atlan-tis. The mythical backstory and unfolding ave-nues for participation blur the boundariesbetween the Atlantian world and local contexts,motivating students to engage in social issuesthat have local relevance. The progression ofquests allows students to go beyond an isolatedacquaintance with these issues and with disci-plinary content.

Toward documenting the effectiveness of theproject, a series of studies evaluating the impactof QA on learning showed that, when respond-ing to personal narratives, students participat-ing in QA offered character insights that wereeither deeper or better supported than did stu-dents in equivalent conditions; additionally, ele-mentary students who used QA demonstratedstatistically significant learning over time in theareas of science, social studies, and sense of aca-demic efficacy (Barab, Dodge, Jackson, & Arici,2003). QA has been adopted by more than fourdozen teachers, distributed around the world,without any external incentive for doing so.Interviews with a subset of these teachers indi-cated their primary reasons to be the social com-mitments, direct connection to academicstandards, and perception that this use of tech-

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nology would be engaging to students. Further,in addition to the thousands of quests assignedby teachers and participating staff, children ages9– 12 in both school and after-school settingshave voluntarily completed hundreds of educa-tional quests without any mandated require-ment. These findings, coupled with dozens ofstudent and teacher interviews, suggest that theQA context is engaging, meaningful, and educa-tional.

In terms of the design of technologies forlearning, the field of instructional design hassuccessfully applied a host of systematic designmodels to develop numerous artifacts that havesupported learning (Dick & Cary, 1990; Heinich,Molenda, Russell, & Smaldino, 1996; Reigeluth,1999). Although these models are especially use-ful in supporting human-computer interactiondesigns as tested in usability studies, throughour own work we have found that they may notbe as effective when designing for complex,sociotechnical interactions that are mediated bytechnology, that evolve over time, that involvemultiuser collaboration, and that are flexiblyadaptive to the needs of local contexts (Barab,Schatz, & Scheckler, in press). It is our belief thatcomplex goals involving social interaction areinadequately met by one-time analyses or eveniterative design models, and instead, requiredesigning for sociability and designs that areflexibly adaptive to local needs (Schwartz, Lin,Brophy, & Bransford, 1999). These types of par-ticipatory designs are iterative, distributed, andlocally owned, evolving, as does a bazaar, ratherthan being constructed, like a cathedral.

More generally, our design work is an exam-ple of what we refer to as socially responsivedesign. This type of design work involves build-ing sociotechnical structures that are explicitlydesigned in collaboration with, and toward thecontinual growth of, individuals and those com-munities in which they are nested. In our casethis type of design work has involved balancingthe educational, motivational, and social priori-ties that underlie our work. More specifically,our work has involved the development of QA,which includes a series of participant structures,activity sets, and social commitments that lever-age a multiuser virtual environment to immersechildren, ages 9– 12, in educational tasks. Build-

ing on strategies from online role-playinggames, QA combines strategies used in the com-mercial gaming environment to engage userswith lessons from educational research on learn-ing and motivation. In addition to the use ofentertainment strategies and research on effec-tive pedagogy, QA is a vehicle for advancing thesocial agenda of empowering individuals andcommunities. Collectively, these three features(education, entertainment, social commitment)create an important focus for design and resultin a product that is not a game yet remainsengaging, is not a lesson yet fosters learning,and is not evangelical yet nurtures a socialagenda. In this article, we treat our work as anexample of design-based research (Brown, 1992;Collins, 1992; Edelson, 2002), describing both theready-made environment and the complexissues that characterize its implementation in amanner that may be useful to others engaging insimilar design work.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The theoretical framework for the project maybe traced to the early 20th-century writings ofVygotsky (1933/1978; 1934/1986), whose pion-eering work continues to inform such currenttheoretical discussions as activity theory (e.g.,Engeström, 1987), sociocultural constructivism(e.g., Duffy & Cunningham, 1996; Rogoff, 1990),distributed cognition (e.g., Cole & Engeström,1993), and situated learning (e.g., Barab & Duffy,2000; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Many writers haveidentified central components of Vygotsky’swork. Wertsch (1985), for example, describedthree core themes of Vygotsky’s theoreticalframework, including his (a) developmentalmodel and his emphasis on (b) social processesand on the (c) mediating tools and signs. Fivethemes in our work are derived from Vygotsky:(a) human development, (b) social constructiv-ism, (c) social context for thought and activity,(d) the zone of proximal development (ZPD),and (e) children’s play.

While much research has focused on and dis-cussed the first four themes, our research alsoreflects a less widely discussed concern ofVygotsky’s, that of play. Consistent with the

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framework established above is Vygotsky’snovel stance toward play: “ The old adage thatchild’s play is imagination in action must bereversed: we can say that imagination in adoles-cents and school children is play without action”(1933/1978, p. 93). Vygotsky’s words empha-sized the centrality of activity. Vygotsky wrote,for example, that “ play creates a zone of proxi-mal development for the child. In play, a childalways behaves beyond his average age, abovehis daily behavior” (1933/1978, p. 102). It isimportant to clarify that for Vygotsky, play wasnot simply an imaginary activity somehow dis-tinct from the real world, nor was play an unre-stricted, free activity. Rather, play offers acontext that is constituted by constraints of allkinds— although different and potentially liber-ating from many social constraints in which thechild’s behavior occurs. An important challengefor designers working to leverage play to sup-port learning and the embracing of particularsocial commitments is to determine which con-straints need to be implemented, and how theseare framed so that they are useful and meaning-ful to the child.

THE TRIADIC FOUNDATION FOR DESIGN

A triadic foundation underlies our work. Specific-ally, this involves design work that forges theintersection of education, entertainment, andour social commitments. We have worked tounderstand how to develop a game withoutguns that provides excitement without violence,a girl-friendly environment that still is attractiveto boys, that includes inquiry-based and experi-ential activities that are in alignment with stan-dards and that can be assessed for learninggains, and that is committed to making theworld a better place. Each aspect of this triad isdescribed next.

Education: Designing for Understanding

It is generally accepted that learners should beinvolved in doing domain-related activities, notsimply receiving the results of someone else’sactivities as summarized in texts or heard in lec-

tures (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2002).Underlying the development of QA learningtasks, curricular units, and the experience of QAmore generally, is a participatory frameworkthat stresses hands-on action and reflection ascomponents central to the learning process,while treating context as co-determinant ofmeaning. This notion of an active learnerengaged in real-world activities figures centrallyin the child-centered, experientially focused,and inquiry-based learning environments advo-cated in the literature. It also aligns with currentframeworks and plans for educational reform(Bransford et al., 2002; National Research Coun-cil, 1999). Underlying the application of a partic-ipatory framework to guide the design of QA isour belief that education and actual experiencebear a necessary and intimate relationship.Accordingly, our design work is grounded inthree related perspectives toward learning: (a)experiential learning, (b) inquiry-based learn-ing, and (c) portfolio assessment.

Numerous scholars and learning theoristshave advocated experiential learning— the beliefthat learning involves real-world participation,the belief in the intimate relations between expe-rience and education, the certainty that under-standings are derived from and modifiedthrough experience, and the conviction thataction and reflection are necessary features ofmeaningful learning (Dewey, 1938; Kolb, 1984).Regarding inquiry-based learning, there is broadconsensus among educators and psychologistsin a variety of fields that students learn bestwhen the learning process involves inquiry, asopposed to the memorization of the facts andprinciples that were generated from someoneelse’s inquiry (American Association for theAdvancement of Science, 1993; Barab, Hay, Bar-nett, & Squire, 2001; Bransford et al., 2002;Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, & Soloway, 1994;National Research Council, 1999). Lastly, in con-trast with assessment as an activity distinct fromthe learning process, portfolio assessment involvesevaluating authentic student work and provesto be particularly valuable when evaluating out-comes that result from experiential and inquiry-based learning (e.g., action plans, interviews,scrapbooks, presentations, stories; Wiggins,1992).

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Entertainment: Designing for Engagement

Children today grow up in an exciting andchanging world of communication and media.Television, digital technology, the Internet,video games, mobile phones, and personaldesktop and wireless devices create novel waysfor children to play, express themselves, learn,communicate, and explore texts, ideas, andidentities (Willet, 2001). However, while pro-ducers of modern media and popular culturehave developed profoundly entertaining prod-ucts to engage our children (Jenkins, 1998;Squire, 2002), examples of materials that sup-port academic learning remain few in numberand, moreover, rarely integrated with activitiesin the school setting. This is particularly truewith respect to video games, which have beenthe object of sustained critique by concernedparents and educators (Squire, 2002). A strategycommonly adopted by the entertainment indus-try involves developing participatory contextsthat have elements of challenge, curiosity, play,and control (Cordova & Lepper, 1996). In con-trast, the education and design community hasdeveloped many curricula and contexts to sup-port learning but has not necessarily capturedthe interests and motivations of children.Instead of learning from the success of modernmedia and pop culture producers, educatorshave distanced themselves from those who arethe most successful in engaging children.

One of the most exciting developments ininteractive electronic entertainment has been thepopularization of persistent virtual worlds(often referred to as Massively Multiplayer Onl-ine Role Playing Games and multiuser virtualenvironments [MUVEs]). These environmentsgrow out of the tradition of Multiuser Dungeons(MUDs), text-based environments where play-ers collaborate to solve quests, engage in com-bat, develop and manage virtual businesses,organize and manage virtual societies, politickwith other players, design the environment, orsimply participate in text-based chats (Bartle,2003; Kollock & Smith, 1996). Of key importanceto persistent worlds is that they are persistentsocial and material environments, universeswith their own culture and discourses. Persis-

tent worlds can be thought of as discourse com-munities that recruit complex cognitive andcommunicative practices, much the way partici-pation in scientific communities produces com-plex cognitive processes (Bartle, 1996; Kollock &Smith, 1996). Persistent virtual worlds literallysupport hundreds of thousands of users eachday, consuming hundreds of millions of manhours per game, sporting economies that sur-pass the gross national product of many actualcountries (Castronova, 2001; Kolbert, 2001).Since desktop computers with powerful graph-ics and Internet capabilities have become readilyaffordable by schools, MUVEs now provide aninnovative medium for engaging children inlearning (McLellan, 1996). For example, Bruck-man (1998) has been studying how children cre-ate and share artifacts as a means of learningprogramming and collaborative skills in the tex-tual MUVE MOOSE Crossing (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/moose-crossing/) and in thegraphical MUVE AquaMOOSE 3-D (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/aquamoose/). Bers (2001)studies how children construct identity in aMUVE (http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/marinau/Zora/) through sharing stories to form a vir-tual therapeutic community. Dede and Ketlehut(2003) have been developing and researchingRiver City, which uses a Multiuser Virtual Envi-ronment Experiential Simulator (MUVEES) tointroduce an engaging multiuser virtual envi-ronment that teaches science concepts in a waythat draws on curiosity and play (http://www.virtual.gmu.edu/muvees). How to establish aMUVE context that engages academic learninghas been a focus of our work.

On a similar note, despite long-standing criti-cism (e.g., Cassell & Jenkins, 1998), the softwareindustry has been slow to respond to the needsof girls. In an exhaustive review of commercialsoftware games, for example, Stanley (Women’sFoundation of Colorado, 1999) found that “ thenumber of software titles being produced thatappeal to girls is very low, and those that areavailable generally lack creative content andtechnological sophistication, and rely largely onstereotypical themes and ideas” (p. 3); or asHerz (1997) quipped, “ boys’ games have theonly female characters worth playing” (p. 182).Significantly, this lack of representation is one of

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a host of barriers to what critics call for as “ gen-der equity” in computing (Turkle, Dennis et al.,2000/2002, p. 264). As such, a core focus for oursocially responsive design work has been todevelop a MUVE that equally engages boys andgirls.

Social Commitments: Designing for Change

Some have argued that research should begrounded in social commitments that empowerthe disenfranchised or underrepresented todirect their own activity, rather than allow it tobe directed by the agendas of others or of extantsocial structures. Fine (1996), for example, pro-moted anthropological research “ which empow-ers as it exposes, which offers critique as itreveals not only what is not but what could be”(p. 16). Reason (1994) and Finn (1994) advocatedparticipatory action research, referring to workthat explicitly seeks to empower both groupsand individuals. Delgado-Gaitan and Trueba(1991) developed a framework called the Eth-nography of Empowerment, which seeks touncover disempowering structures, leading tothe eventual empowerment of disenfranchisedcommunities. Levinson (1998), in support ofbringing an empowering social commitment toresearch, wrote, “ The justification for [applied]research does not derive solely from theoreticalconsiderations; it derives from a perceived prob-lem in need of solution, or an opportunity forhumane intervention” (p. 86).

It is our view that not only education buteven design work should be conducted in asocially responsive manner; that is, aspiringtoward such ideals as empowerment, and beingsocially responsive while articulating and evenoperationalizing those commitments. Firmlyensconced in our research, design, implementa-tion, and evaluation practices, then, this centraltheme of social empowerment infuses our workwith meaning.

Applied or “ critical” ethnographers are com-mitted to exposing unequal power structuresand advocating the social consequences ofanthropological work (Freire, 1970/2000; Levin-son, 1998). This work takes a step toward bring-ing a transformative agenda to the more

value-neutral, traditional ethnographic oranthropological approach. The goal in this workis to uncover, expose, and deconstruct thosepower structures that serve to subjugate a seg-ment of a population (Glesne, 1999). Said sim-ply, critical ethnography seeks to empower thepeople it aims to understand. However, Barab etal. (2002) argued,

While critical ethnography does embrace a social com-mitment or “ critique” and, as such, has value addedover traditional ethnographic accounts, it does notnecessarily package this critique in a manner that canbe used by others who were not part of the site inwhich the critique was developed, thereby limiting itspotential impact. (p. 2)

The field of instructional design has pro-duced many products, and has developednumerous principles for designing them. Whilethese well-designed programs, software appli-cations, and online communities have sup-ported deep understandings and novelpractices, less common in this design work is anagenda that has the goal of exposing and trans-forming inequities. It is in the service of an altru-istic agenda that we have taken up sociallyresponsive design, which has at its core the goalof designing sociotechnical structures that sup-port users and those communities in which theyare nested in their own transformation.

METHODS

Our design process for this project can bethought of as an example of design-basedresearch, or what Brown and Collins referred toas design experiments. This methodological par-adigm was introduced by Collins (1992) andBrown (1992), who advocated a new method-ological approach for carrying out research anddesign work in the context of real-life settings. Incommunicating the activity and the need,Brown (1992) stated,

As a design scientist in my field, I attempt to engineerinnovative educational environments and simulta-neously conduct experimental studies of those innova-tions. This involves orchestrating all aspects of aperiod of daily life in classrooms, a research activity forwhich I was not trained. (p. 141)

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Design-based research involves introducinginnovations into the booming, buzzing confu-sion of real-world practice (as opposed to con-strained laboratory contexts), and examining theimpact of those designs on the learning process(Barab & Squire, 2004). Lessons learned are thencycled back into the next iteration of the designinnovation. Roth (1998) found that:

Because of the closeness to the classroom, designexperiments constitute research efforts that are notonly suitable to generate theory from practice, but—because of the thick descriptions they can provide—inform practice and practitioners in meaningful ways.(p. xvii)

Because design experiments develop theoryin practice, they can lead to interventions thatare trustworthy, credible, transferable, and eco-logically valid.

Socially responsive design work addsanother layer of complexity to the already com-plex process of instructional design. One nolonger simply designs an artifact to deliver pre-defined content or to support a process in whichthe final product is already known. Instead,socially responsive design work involves engag-ing participants in activities that expose inequi-ties, stirring interest in complicated issues andstimulating local ownership over the entire pro-cess. Socially responsive design work bringstogether critical ethnography, instructionaldesign, and social activism with a focus on pro-ducing a designed artifact and process that hasat its core the goal of facilitating individual andsocietal transformation (Grills, 1998), creatingties to action research (Eden & Huxham, 1996;McNiff, 1995; Stringer, 1996; Wells, 1999) andcritical ethnography (Freire, 1970/2000; Levin-son, 1998). However, where the actionresearcher and the critical ethnographer stop atthe daunting task of supporting change in oneparticular context, the design ethnographeraccepts the added challenge of reifying this cri-tique and associated social commitments into adesign that can be taken up and usefully inte-grated into other contexts.

Given the above complexities, sociallyresponsive design involves the process of designethnography (see Barab, Thomas et al., in press).As a brief overview, design ethnography

involves four components: (a) developing a“ thick description” of one context (Geertz, 1976),(b) developing a series of social commitmentsthat have local and global significance, (c) reify-ing these understandings and commitments intoa design, and (d) supporting scaling up and localcustomization. This process involves designwork coupled with the continual production ofnaturalistic interpretations based on both quali-tative and quantitative data over extended timeframes and at multiple sites; it involves usingmultiple data sources and continually cyclingbetween the processes of data collection, coding,and analysis, with the lessons learned at eachstep being used to direct the subsequent pro-cesses (Scriven, 1983; Stake, 1978, 1995). Qualita-tive data collection efforts target the evolvingtechnical structures (e.g., Websites, developedartifacts at the Centers, design decisions) as wellas the social relationships, interactions, member-produced work, and conver- sations (online andface-to-face) through which these structures areinformed and take on meaning. Further, in thiswork the technical structures and personal rela-tionships are not treated separately, but insteadethnographic procedures and specifically, par-ticipant observation, interviews, and memberchecking are used to better understand the socialissues as they relate to the technical affordancesof project elements.

The interpretations presented here arederived largely from the qualitative data, col-lected by 10 researchers over a 30-month periodfrom multiple locations both here in the UnitedStates and overseas. Our understanding of thedata began through our reflecting on our experi-ences and the extant data to produce a list of theissues that were important for understandingQA. However, rather than existing as episodesor periods independently of each other, theseissues may be considered as braids that, whendescribed as a collective, form the tapestry thatis QA. Although it is common to look to thedesigned (technical) artifacts as QA, a richer andmore useful perspective can be gleaned from anappreciation of the complex sociotechnicalissues that have surrounded the developmentand implementation of QA. In identifying whichissues to highlight, we examined our field notesand submitted articles; reviewed e-mail

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exchanges, student work, and interviews; andreflected on our first-hand experiences todevelop a useful list of those braids that weremost significant to the project and that would bemost useful to others. This process resulted inthe identification of four braids presented in theCore Themes section of the results, following thediscussion of the flexibly adaptive design itself:(a) Creating a Vision, (b) the ParticipatoryDesign Process, (c) Developing a Metacontext,and (d) Supporting Project Implementation. Toprovide a context for the reader, described firstis the technical design, with the caveat that thisis a fragmented picture of the larger sociotechni-cal design that constitutes QA.

FLEXIBLY ADAPTIVE DESIGN: THETECHNICAL INSTANTIATION OF QA

A central component of role-playing games isthat the user assumes a role within the gamecontext. In QA, the child is assigned the task ofusing the virtual environment and respondingto the associated quests (developmentallyappropriate activities that include a task de-scription, specific goals, and useful resources),so as to help the Council of Atlantis restore lostwisdom. The QA story line (or myth), associatedstructures, and policies constitute what isreferred to as a metagame in the commercialgaming sector. A metagame refers to a genre ofplay in which there is an overall structure thatlends form, meaning, and cohesion to collectionof nested activities or games, all of which havetheir own identifiable rules and challenges. Thisstructure creates a boundary condition thatunites the individual actions and outcomes ofthese otherwise disparate activities. Specifically,the QA metagame consists of several key ele-ments:

• A shared mythological context that estab-lishes and supports QA activities.

• A set of online spaces through which chil-dren, mentors (local staff, older children, orteachers), and Atlantian characters can inter-act with each other.

• A well-defined advancement system cen-tered on pedagogically valid activities thatencourage academic and social learning.

• Regalia and rewards associated withadvancement and wisdom.

• An individual home page for each child,showing their advancement and serving as arepository for their work.

Through this metacontext, quests and mem-ber behaviors are targeted and instilled withmeaning, with their primary function being bothstructural (providing a cohesive framework)and motivational (providing an engaging con-text to stimulate participation and learning).However, in contrast to traditional role-playinggames, in QA the student’s game identity andactivity are dependent on his or her ability toexit the virtual environment to accomplishquests in the physical world. Given the authen-tic nature of participation, identity within QAmight best be considered an extension of one’sdaily self, rather than a fiction, experiment, orsubstitute. At one level, QA is a MUVE thatimmerses children in educational tasks as part ofan online adventure to save Atlantis fromimpending disaster. However, the QA project ismore than a computer program; QA is bestviewed as a series of participant structures,activity sets, and social commitments that con-stitute the QA identity— what is referred to inthe business world as a brand.

The QA community consists of both the vir-tual space and the face-to-face QA Centers. Inorder to participate in QA, children must beassociated with a particular QA Center (such asparticipating elementary schools, Boys and GirlsClubs, local libraries) and must register on theQA Website. Once students are registered, theymay use the QA software at any participatingCenter or from other locations with Internetaccess. When the QA software first opens, stu-dents are presented with a split screen in theinterface window: On the left is the virtual envi-ronment through which students can explore,interact with others, and find quests; on the rightis a side-bar browser, opening dynamically gen-erated Web pages to support the QA experience(see Figure 1).

The virtual space is organized into different3-D worlds; by using their avatars studentsmove through these worlds, meet the avatars ofother students, participate in communal activi-ties, and explore different quests. The partici-

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pant’s attributes persist from one session to thenext and are saved within an avatar, that is, avirtual placeholder symbolizing one’s identityin the virtual space and allowing interactionwith the environment (Damar, 1998; Poole,2000). The avatar itself is the vehicle throughwhich the participant interacts with the environ-ment; the avatar develops a customized look, astatus, and a character as it interacts with theavatars of other members, allowing the individ-ual to experiment with different aspects of his orher identity (Bruckman, 1998; Donath, 1999;Turkle, 1994). The interface features toolbaroptions for customizing the experience, alongwith a function for text-based chatting. The vir-tual world presents links that open quest pagesand other QA pages in the side-bar.

The pages that open on the right side of theQA interface perform different functions, butthey behave in a similar manner: They all pres-ent summary information in the side-bar, andthis information can be opened in a larger pop-up window for viewing and editing (see Figure2 for the most common features of the side-bar).The side-bar pages host custom home pages,introduce quests, announce timely news, and

serve other functions. These pages are openedwhen the user clicks “ hot” objects in the virtual3-D space. The 3-D space also includes otherstructures that facilitate novice and expert use,allow students to experience rudimentary 3-Dbuilding, facilitate collaboration among mem-bers, and offer a multitude of other activities thatsupport identification with the QA experienceand that help to actualize our social commit-ments and support learning. Children can evencoquest with each other, completing the samequest tasks together and then individuallyuploading their reflections.

Other QA activities extend beyond the virtualspace: For example, students develop and sub-mit their work on quests, and they communicatewith each other and with the Atlantis Council.The pages in the side-bar also support theseactivities by offering information on eachstudent’s work, providing tools for sending e-mail within QA, and giving each student a cus-tom home page that other students can visit. Thehome page is the default page in the side-bar,and the other pages are opened by clicking thenavigation links. There is also a Teacher Toolkitthat teachers can use to register students in their

Figure 1 A screenshot from Quest Atlantis, showing a scene from a village on the left and thehomepage for a student on the right.

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classroom, register quests for their particularclassroom, review student work, assign studentwork to other students for review, assignawards to individual students, and keep track ofstudent e-mails and chat entries.

By moving their avatar through the on-screenenvironment, citizens travel to virtual worldswhere they can read about and listen to thethemes of these worlds, complete quests, talkwith other children and with mentors, and buildtheir virtual personae. The virtual space—OTAK— is divided into worlds. Each of the fourprimary worlds of the OTAK— (a) Unity World,(b) Culture World, (c) Ecology World, and (d)Healthy World— is divided into three villages(e.g., Unity World includes Global Village, Com-munity Power Village, and All About Us Vil-lage) that hold up to 25 quests. The OTAKcurrently contains the OTAK-Hub, and the fourprimary worlds. The OTAK-Hub is the centrallocation from which to teleport to each of theworlds. It also offers introductory quests, theTrading Post, general information, and theQuests of the Moth. Each village has a titlereflecting a theme— for example, CommunityPower, Animal Habitats, Water Quality, Words

of Meaning— and an associated series of engag-ing quests. The themes were designed to spandiverse areas of knowledge and feature some-thing for almost everyone, yet still overlap aca-demic categories. Each village houses aspectrum of quests (engaging academic tasksthat take 20 min– 1 week to complete) rangingfrom simulation to application problems ofvarying levels of complexity.

Completing quests requires that studentsparticipate in real-world, socially and academi-cally meaningful activities, such as conductingenvironmental field studies, interviewing fami-lies and friends, researching community prob-lems, examining current events from multipleperspectives, writing autobiographical anec-dotes, producing advocacy media, or develop-ing real-world action plans. Each quest is alsoconnected to local academic standards and to atleast one of our social commitments, discussedbelow. Students can select a number of thesequests, based on their interests or as assigned bytheir teacher if they are participating as part of aschool. The children’s work on quests, which issubmitted through an interface integrated withthe client software, includes both content-area

Figure 2 The OTAK side-bar, which introduces quests, announces timely news, opens theTrading Post, and serves other functions.

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findings and personal reflections to foster reten-tion, critical thinking, and metacognition. Boththe content-based findings and the personal,process-oriented reflections are assessed by theteacher and/or other students. In this way, thequests bring together two traditionally disparateforces— the motivation of free play and the rigorof academics— and, through a system of checksand balances, they scaffold children’s explora-tion while ensuring robust content.

By completing quests, the child earns pointsand gains status in the virtual environment.These points can be exchanged at the TradingPost for items such as QA stationery, stickersand pins, and even trading cards about famouspeople— the latter became a powerful form ofmotivation in our initial work. Over time andafter completing a series of quests, the studentcan gain virtual world privileges, such as walk-ing through objects and flying, and even acquirebuilding permission for the virtual space. Addi-tionally, student home pages allow students todevelop an online persona, itself a powerfulmotivator for engaging participation in onlineworlds (Turkle, 1995), and moreover, these per-sonae contribute to formative identities or senseof self (Bers, 2001).

Children’s work on quests includesresponses (text reports or uploaded file attach-ments) and reflections (text commentary), bothof which are submitted through an online sys-tem that connects students and the Council. Aspart of the legend underlying QA, this Council isa group of Atlantians committed to staving offdisaster by learning about the Earth by way ofchildren. Council members are characters thatappear in such media as the QA videos, comicbook, and novella, as well as the 3-D space andthe introductory video for commencing the proj-ect at new sites. Although children know theCouncil is not real, they, along with participat-ing teachers, consistently state that they find thestory line quite engaging, and helping the Coun-cil rebuild the lost knowledge of Atlantis servesto establish an altruistic context for participa-tion.

An additional component that supportsimplementation is the QA project unit plans.The two-to-three-week-long units aid theteacher by providing a manageable implementa-

tion structure or activity set, which includes var-ious quests and a culminating activity, such aschildren developing a “ world’s fair” to promoteinternational awareness. Another example is thediversity unit, in which children produce adiversity affirmation book; that is, a collection ofchild-developed poems, stories, songs, pictures,artwork, and such; along with a diversity play,in which students engage community issues aspart of a script performed at the local theater forparents and community members. The impor-tant point is that with currently more than 400quests, 8 unit plans, and 25 starter activities, noteacher could possibly implement all QA activi-ties. Therefore, when conducting workshopswith teachers, we introduce QA as a collection ofresources, opportunities, social commitments,and an engaging MUVE structure that they canintegrate in diverse ways to meet local imple-mentation needs— a process described in thenext section.

CORE THEMES

Creating a Vision

An important feature of effective design work isthat it is grounded in the life worlds of those it ismeant to serve. Most instructional designersusually begin with some sort of needs or contextanalysis (Heinich et al., 1996), to understand thepotential context of use. Though we did collabo-rate with local sites to conduct some limited con-text analyses, in the beginning we believed thatwe had a fairly solid vision of what needed to bedesigned and so treated these sites more asusability sites than as precipitants of a funda-mentally altered vision (Barab, Thomas et al., inpress). Over time, however, these sites becameless of a repository for our predesigned visionand more of a collaborative group with whom tococonstruct a vision of QA. Toward this end, wespent more and more time listening, eventuallychoosing to build an ethnographic account ofone after-school site (Geertz, 1976), and conduct-ing interviews and focus groups with others, allof which were used to guide our future designwork. This process uncovered much detail aboutthe various life worlds of the groups with whomwe designed QA.

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This attitude of treating potential and actualparticipants of the system as collaborators haspermeated our thinking, and, two years later,continues to inform the project through its scal-ing and adaptation. Another core change in ourthinking during this initial period involvedshifting from designing a learning environmentsimply for content learning, to developing aseries of participant structures targeted towardthe development of the entire child. This shiftreframed QA less as a Website or computer pro-gram and more as a sociotechnical network con-stituted by various design structures, numerousparticipants, emerging and ongoing social rela-tionships, and particular norms and values.Moreover, the commitment to socially respon-sive design became more evident: For instance,instead of simply supporting math and sciencelearning, quests were focused on the adoptedsocial commitments. This also led to the devel-opment of Unity World, for example, with itsassociated villages of Community Power, GlobalAwareness, and All About Us— titles reflecting acommitment to empower the whole learner andhis or her nested communities.

Toward understanding the lives of thosewith whom we design, we spent time learningabout the television shows children liked towatch, the movies that interested them, themusic they listened to, the magazines they read,the games they liked to play, and what and whowere considered “ cool.” The children told uswhat they liked to do in school, at home, andwith friends, and they let us work with them inthe computer lab at the after-school center. Thechildren also borrowed cameras, photographingscenes in their lives to show us what was impor-tant to them. With this data, we attempted toidentify patterns, such as which games the girlsliked to play and which most interested theboys, and, as much as possible, worked toinstantiate all of these interests into the develop-ing project. As the design of particular struc-tures progressed, our use of rapid visualprototyping helped us to understand andrespond to the preferences of the children.

The evolving mission of QA is to supportchildren in developing their own sense of pur-pose as individuals, as members of their com-munities, and as knowledgeable citizens of the

world. Toward realizing this mission, the pro-gram came to embrace seven social commit-ments and respective, abbreviated slogans thatunderlie our design decisions:

1. Creative Expression— I Express Myself.

2. Diversity Affirmation— Everyone Matters.

3. Personal Agency— I Have Voice.

4. Social Responsibility— We Can Make a Dif-ference.

5. Environmental Awareness— Think Globally,Act Locally.

6. Healthy Communities— Live, Love, Grow.

7. Compassionate Wisdom— Be Kind.

These commitments are evident in the ani-mated movies, emergent plotlines, choices oftopics for quests and unit plans, and postersadorning Center walls. They are what drives ourwork and what excites the teachers to becomeinvolved. In fact, teachers remark that the mostcommon reason they join QA is to be involved ina project that is connected to standards, thatintegrates technology, and that has meaningfulsocial commitments.

A final aspect of the initial vision relates togood pedagogy, specifically, the commitment tosupport experiential and inquiry-based learn-ing, as well as to integrate portfolio-basedassessment practices. The design of QA reflectsthe need for both action and reflection, with afocus on inquiry-based activities that supportthe learner in generating information, in evalu-ating its relevance to real-world problems, inconstructing meanings in authentic settings, andin justifying the credibility of assertions. This isdemonstrated best by the quests, which intro-duce a problem for inquiry and provideresources to support learners in their inquiry.These inquiry-based activities are grounded inreal-world issues and require the application ofprinciples, methods, and conceptual under-standings associated with core disciplines.

The Participatory Design Process

Consistent with others involved in participatorydesign work (Gaver, 1996; Schuler & Namioka,1993; Schwen, Godrum, & Dorsey, 1993; Was-

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son, 2000), our design process has involved acollaborative posture in which those who imple-ment the design work also have a hand in itsevolution. This began at our initial Boys andGirls Club site and has continued throughoutthe implementation and scaling process. Thesecollaborations provide opportunities for us tocollectively develop understandings on how tointegrate QA in particular contexts and, at thesame time, to understand how to reconfigureQA to better support multiple contexts. Ratherthan distribute a completed design, our main-taining a participatory posture creates a betterrelationship with future Centers and helps us tolearn through these collaborations. It also allowsthe Centers the freedom to implement QA in amanner that meets their local needs. Throughoutthe design and implementation process, wehave worked with children, staff, and parents ascodesigners, mutually determining the purpose,value, and worth of the emergent collaborationand design work. For instance, as participantsimplemented QA in their respective contexts,they sent us dozens of e-mails on an ongoingbasis offering suggestions that were then used todirect further design revisions. The agendas ofour collaborators have been as significant indetermining the direction of our research anddevelopment as were those goals that initiallyinformed the project.

A core challenge of design work is to avoidbecoming more focused on the designed prod-uct than on the people and interactions that thedesign was developed to support. Even whendesign work aims to support human-computerinteractions, there is a commitment to usabilitystudies in which the designer observes the use ofthe final design in context by potential users.However, our focus is not simply to designusable technical structures that support human-computer interactions, but to develop technicalstructures that support human-human interac-tions as mediated through technology.Designing in response to the social transactionsand emergent norms for use is complex workthat involves addressing both usability andsociability challenges (Barab, MaKinster, Moore,Cunningham, & the ILF Design Team, 2001; Pre-ece, 2000). When designers focus on ongoingsociability issues, they have the opportunity to

facilitate social interactions that are supportiveof the program and the user, as well as the com-munity of which they are a part.

Although participatory and emergent bydesign, the QA program must articulate a set ofeasily understood goals that support meaning-ful learning. Balancing entertainment and edu-cation has been a delicate and difficult task, onethat directly speaks to the nature of both motiva-tion and cognition. In terms of the former, theentertainment value (as an expression of motiva-tion intrinsic to the game) is incredibly impor-tant toward establishing a context for learningthat will also be of interest to the children. How-ever, pandering to too many requests for enter-taining products puts us at risk of becomingeducational researchers who simply support theuse of video games in education. The balance ofplay and learning is a delicate one, and at thecenter of this balance is that the quests— thechief form of achievement and cause of advance-ment— require academic work. In terms ofengagement, we have found that the social com-mitments are frequently as motivating to chil-dren as are the entertainment aspects of theproject.

With respect to balancing the educationaland entertainment value of QA, when childrenare introduced to QA as a game, they may bedisappointed and frustrated by the amount ofacademic work required. However, when chil-dren are told that they are going to do educa-tional activities on the computer, then theythemselves characterize QA as a game andbecome more willing to do the work. In fact, onechild involved in the program in an after-schoolcontext referred to QA as a work activity, butwhen QA was introduced at his school, hedescribed it as a game. Such a shifting character-ization of the program not only reveals our tri-adic foundation as dynamic but emphasizes therole of context in codetermining meanings. Ourrecent research involved interviewing fourdozen children and collecting questionnairedata from another 200 about how they rank QAin terms of playing, helping, learning, and work-ing. While some activities might have scoredhigh on one particular dimension, QA scoredsignificantly higher on the sum of all fourdimensions than any other activity in which the

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students engaged (e.g., non-QA school work,playing with friends, reading books, etc.) (Barabet al., 2003). The fact that children regard QA asa form of play even though they are doing schoolwork, and that they rate it almost as highly onthis dimension as playing video games, is partic-ularly interesting, given that a significant amountof QA activity involves doing academic work.Interviews with children suggest that themetagame context can turn even an academicactivity into one that is more associated withplay— a point taken up in the next section.

Developing a Metacontext

A core component of role-playing games is thatthe user assumes a role within the game context.As stated above, a metagame refers to amacrolevel structure that subsumes and givescoherence to multiple microlevel activities. Thisis frequently the case in online role-playinggames such as Everquest (http://www.everqu-est.com) or Asheron’s Call (http://www.asheronscall.com) (Axelsson & Regan, 2002; Koster,2000). In these games, there is some larger task(e.g., saving the world from invading monsters)involving multiple activities such as killingmonsters, building houses, purchasing armor,finding gems, accruing apprentices, and soforth. In QA, members are asked to help theCouncil rebuild the Arch of Wisdom, which wasdestroyed by misguided rulers seeking techno-logical progress at any cost; as a result, theirworld faces environmental, moral, and socialdecay. Through completing quests, developedprimarily by the fictitious Atlantian Council toaddress specific social issues, students assist theCouncil in building a collective knowledge baseto help them address their problems and saveAtlantis from problems similar to those faced onEarth. To the extent that students “ buy in” tothis story line, they complete quests for thegame, but at the same time address real-worldissues on Earth.

In terms of entertainment, a large part of thesuccess of persistent virtual environmentsinvolving role playing results from their provid-ing users the opportunity to enter a different(virtual) world (Reid, 1999). A key aspect of QA

is that the development of the game identityreflects the child’s ability to accomplish activitiesin the real world, not simply in the virtual envi-ronment— bringing together what is real andwhat is virtual. In this way, the fantasy overlapswith the real world, providing a mutable plat-form through which our social commitmentsbecome manifest and suggesting that the QAcontext is not simply a role-playing environ-ment, but extends through a story line thatdirectly engages issues of real-world identityand community. Neither the entertainment northe educational aspects of QA are given priority:Favoring the latter will alienate the children,while favoring the former will alienate thosestakeholders (teachers and staff) who are thegatekeepers of the school.

The design for QA has involved establishingstructures in which learning and reflection arecentral, even becoming activities that are mean-ingful in their own right. Providing evidence ofthis occurring is that, in addition to the thou-sands of assigned quests, children have com-pleted hundreds of quests either in after-schoolcontexts or without being assigned by theirteachers. Further, in one branch of our research,students complete one of the quests either aspart of the QA context or, alternatively, as aworksheet stripped of any mention of the Coun-cil or the QA context more generally. Prelimi-nary results show that students are willing tocomplete significantly more work and rate theactivity as more interesting when completed inthe context of QA (Barab et al., 2003). Even so,the use of point systems and various rewardsstructures to motivate student work may be con-sidered coercive, so we continue to seek to estab-lish ways to focus student participation, notsolely on earning points, but instead on the qual-ity and pleasure of the work itself. Still, despitethis concern over the use of points and associ-ated reward structures to engender participa-tion, the evidence does not suggest that thesestructures undermine other school work.

Consistent with traditional conceptions ofmulticulturalism, the QA Council includes maleand female characters having features associ-ated with African American, Asian, Hispanic,and Anglo populations. Though this distribu-tion is grounded in the demographics of the

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early student participants, further reflectionmight challenge whether mere balanced hetero-geneity truly represents broad cultural diversity.In fact, our Australian and Singaporean collabo-rators have commented that the story lines,norms, quests, and ways of interacting withinthe program may not represent those associatedwith people from their own countries. Accord-ingly, this led to the development of multicultu-ral quests and the featuring of issues of culturalhomogeneity within the QA legend, with theCouncil positing the lack of multiple perspec-tives as a core problem facing Atlantis. In thisway, issues of multiculturalism are implicitlyengaged through the QA backstory, and explic-itly targeted in particular quests.

Entwined in the history of QA and the devel-opment of its structures is our ongoing concernwith gender representation (see Cassell &Jenkins, 1998), including responding to sugges-tions from industry (e.g., Laurel, 2001) and ourown research. For example, the bright and vividcolors of the virtual worlds, as opposed to thedark and gloomy look of many MUVEsdesigned by the entertainment industry, wereimplemented in particular to engage girls. Girlsexpress enjoying plot and story, and we sup-ported this with a rich backstory for our legend,and worked to develop the characters, includingfeaturing a blue-haired teenage girl as the cen-tral character, an identifiable entry point for girlsinto the project. In fact, we have consistentlylearned through interviews with children andteachers that choosing a girl as the central char-acter has been one of the main reasons that ini-tially girls find QA to be engaging. Therefore,we consistently ensure that in each movieposter, comic, novel, and so forth, we alwayshave a girl featured. Of the more than 3,000 reg-istered questers, 49% are female, and these girlshave submitted more than half of the quests, andhave sent more than 15,000 e-mails (58%), whileboys have sent only 11,000 (42%); the girls haveposted more than 85,000 lines of chat (55%),compared to the boys, who total 70,000 (45%).Additionally, girls have rented as many plots ofland and built as elaborate virtual structures ashave boys.

Similarly, many boys reported that they col-lected trading cards of all kinds: They like col-

lecting them, talking about them, and tradingthem. For this reason, QA trading cards weredeveloped with the expectation that as studentsearned points through questing, they couldtrade them in for cards. Our trading cards repre-sent real people (e.g., Jacques Cousteau,Mahatma Ghandi, Mother Theresa) and theirpositive contributions to the world. Signifi-cantly, students engage in quests, not only forschool credit or QA points, but as part of thegreater mission in helping the Council of Atlan-tis rebuild its lost knowledge, an altruistic con-text that has proven quite compelling to girlsand boys alike.

Supporting Project Implementation

A commonly cited feature of successfully imple-mented educational programs is their ability toadapt to the needs of local contexts (Fullan,1993), particularly with programs that entail areform agenda such as supporting educationalinnovation, identity transformation, or culturalchange. Every context challenges the projectwith a new set of circumstances, personalities,resources, cultural norms, and other variablesthat directly and indirectly speak to the viabilityof project implementation. Many researcherswho have studied the implementation of pro-jects in multiple settings have found that localcustomizability is the key to successful imple-mentation (Randi & Corno, 1997). That is, theprogram must be flexible enough to adapt tolocal conditions and provide meaningful waysfor local stakeholders to legitimately feel thatthey are part of the project and that their opin-ions are not only respected but show tangiblemanifestations in their local iteration of the proj-ect. However, this customization can go too far ifthe local adaptations result in a metamorphosisthat renders the innovation unrecognizable. Forexample, early on in the project, a large andpromising district proposed simply using thetechnological skeleton yet not adopting the par-ticular curriculum or social commitments.Despite our enthusiasm about their interest andthe funds they would bring to the collaboration,our conviction was that their proposal disre-garded the most innovative and important

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aspects of QA. On the other hand, to the extentthat our social commitments may be reified inthe design, a user’s engagement with the designartifacts may afford and even invite consider-ation of the commitments, so in this regard arobust design might help even philosophical ori-entations survive in contexts hostile to them.

Schwartz et al. (1999) argued for flexibly adap-tive design processes that allow educationalproducts to be designed in a way that strikes abalance between complete control by designersand easy reconfiguration by teachers and otherstakeholders who will use the products. Offeredas components of the QA program are a varietyof resources in various media (i.e., a MUVE con-text, comic books, a novel, a board game, tradingcards, unit plans, scavenger hunts, quests), sothat teachers can integrate QA based on theirown local needs. In fact, there is no one distinctQA program: Multiple activity sets afford theproduction of different activity systems support-ing different needs. For example, a situation inwhich a teacher implements only random questsor only tangentially engages the QA story lineresults in the creation of a context very differentfrom one in which a teacher implements a com-plex unit plan. Even in terms of unit plans, someteachers focus on language arts, others on sci-ence, and still others on social studies, for exam-ple. Having multiple participant structuresallows us to support the needs of different con-texts as well as different teachers, teachingstyles, and preferences, and also different stu-dents, parental concerns, and stakeholders. Oneproblem with this freedom arises when teachersomit aspects deemed central to our pedagogicaland social commitments. For example, oneteacher who used QA with five different classesnever showed students the legend, thus under-mining the social commitment and the “ game-ness” of QA. Another teacher, instead ofproviding rich portfolio feedback, assignednumbers from a rubric score as review feedbackfor student quest responses. In both of these cir-cumstances, important aspects of QA were com-promised. However, all of these relationshipsbegin with a discussion of the triadic foundationof our work so that teachers understand ourpedagogical framework, our social commit-ments, and the metagame structure.

The tension between reproducing innova-tions in multiple contexts our of whole cloth andoffering a program that flexibly adapts to multi-ple contexts is central to the problem of broaddiffusion. How does an educational programmaintain its fidelity while adapting to differentcontexts? At what point do these adaptations tolocal contexts become lethal mutations (Brown,1992) that kill, dilute, or distort the flexiblyadaptive innovation? A major struggle in theimplementation of QA has been to usefully har-ness this tension between the need for localcustomization and maintaining the program’sintegrity, finding the strengths in both withoutendangering either. This tension is apparent inthe inquiry-based pedagogy that underliesmuch of QA. A common initial sentiment ofteachers when they hear that QA is a technolog-ical program to support learning is that QA willsomehow teach children. However, QA does notteach, but instead provides an engaging contextand set of nested activities, all of which requireactive participation on the part of the studentand teacher. As a result, implementing QA actu-ally means more work for teachers, as they arerequired to support students undertakingquests, and then review student work— all ofwhich occurs in a public space that can be scruti-nized by the school administration and even theparents of the child who submitted the work.Teachers, and certainly staff working at after-school sites, may not be trained to supportinquiry-based learning, thus creating scalingchallenges as teachers and staff must master anew technology, understand the framework ofQA, and employ a new pedagogy that is timeconsuming and less expedient than simply hav-ing students learn specific facts.

A final approach undertaken to support scal-ing involves the use of “ buoys.” A buoy is anindividual who has become a committed “ earlyadopter” (Rogers, 1995) of the program. Thebuoy, who must be a person from the local con-text and not simply a QA staff member, assists inthe program’s technological, pedagogical, andsocial implementation by serving as a mediatorbetween those at the local site who are imple-menting QA, and the QA staff. To support QAboth nationally and in international contexts,local educators were identified to serve as buoys

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to support the program and its local implemen-tation. Currently the QA project has buoys inFlorida, Australia, Singapore, Denmark, andMalaysia, with more than 3,000 registered users.These buoys use QA not only as a program tosupport the educational and social needs of chil-dren and their communities in each local settingbut also as research sites. For example, our col-league in Australia is supporting teachers byhelping them register students and integrateunit plans, yet at the same time she is collectingdata to publish as her own research and toinform our project evolution. In this way, eachQA site becomes a site of research, with the buoyserving as the chief architect of that research.The buoy is thus a codesigner of QA, animplementer of the program, a researcher of itsimplementation, and an evaluator. The findingsthat spring from this research and evaluation arecycled back into the design of QA to inform itscontinual redesign and ongoing development.This collaborative partnership supports the scal-ing of QA as it continues to be implemented inan increasing number of sites and range of con-texts.

DISCUSSION

This description of QA has provided an over-view of both the ready-made structures and thecore themes that characterize its design andimplementation. At its core, QA sits at the inter-section of education, entertainment, and oursocial commitments, creating many tensions aswe work to balance these features to produce ametagame without guns that supports academiclearning, individual development, and socialtransformation. In this manner, the project inte-grates principles underlying the development ofentertaining games (play, challenge, curiosity,and control) into the design of a learning envi-ronment, a practice frequently absent from text-books and school-based activities. The projectalso entails a rich metagame context throughwhich children perceive their participation asmeaningful and engaging. More generally, theQA project may be regarded as one instance ofsocially responsive design work, a process thatinvolves developing sociotechnical structures

that have an altruistic agenda and engaging par-ticipants in their own and their communities’ongoing transformation.

Central to socially responsive design work isa methodological approach referred to above asdesign ethnography. Whereas the basic ethnog-rapher builds a thick description with the goal ofunderstanding the culture (Geertz, 1976), thecritical ethnographer (Levinson, 1998) goes astep further to leverage this understanding todevelop a critique with the goal of transformingthe context that is being researched. In our workwe have gone farther still, reifying this critiqueinto a design (consisting of artifact and process),with the expectation that this design will engagechildren and their communities at others sites inmeaningful issues affecting their local commu-nities. This latter process risks the charge of eth-nocentrism; however, our conviction is that ifthe process is managed with respect, if thedesign itself is flexibly adaptive, and if eachimplementation is treated as collaborative, thenthis type of design work bears much potential topositively influence the world. At a basic level,we have come to value the importance of havinga flexibly adaptive program (Barab, Thomas etal., in press). The term flexibly adaptive can berelated to the diffusion of innovations such asQA by considering that innovations must beable to adapt to multiple contexts if they will bebroadly implemented.

As an instance of socially responsive designwork, QA combines elements of playing, work-ing, and helping. It is our conviction that if we aseducators do not develop more gaming-likeprinciples into our design tool kits, then theentertainment industry and market, which haveless vested interest in supporting positive iden-tity development than we do, will be the teach-ers of our children. We have tried to capture theenthusiasm and motivation inherent in enter-tainment products, yet situate these into a posi-tive context focused on empowering children,supporting learning, and promoting a socialagenda. This has involved more than simplydesigning a product, but has involved the cre-ation of a QA brand, including the developmentof sets of resources that include but go beyondthe computer program. In this way it is ourchallenge, much as it is for “ Sesame Street” or

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“ Blues Clues,” to develop a vision for what itmeans to be a product user and then to embedthis vision as a potential outcome of interactingwith the numerous project resources. However,it is not simply our goal to ascribe usage or par-ticular values to project participants, but todevelop resources that support local interpreta-tions of the core commitments, values, andbeliefs that underlie our work. Further, it is ourexpectation that the lessons learned in QA willextend to activities outside of QA as well.

QA has a number of characteristics that havehelped it become a valuable intervention forschools. First, it advances a social commitment. Themission of QA is to support children in develop-ing their own sense of purpose as individuals, asmembers of their communities, and as knowl-edgeable citizens of the world, with each questtargeting at least one of the dimensions of devel-opment that we hope to foster. Second is its con-nections to standards. From its inception, andthrough the support and participation of teach-ers and administrators, QA activities have beenacademically grounded, including connectingeach of the more than 400 quests in the system toacademic standards. Third, QA uses an online,metagame strategy to establish a rich environmentthat sets up a meaningful context of participa-tion. This strategy makes use of design featuresand strategies similar to those found in the morepopular computer-based gaming environmentsto capture the interest of children. However, QAgoes beyond the computer domain to engagechildren in their surrounding real community.Fourth, QA employs 3-D technologies to create animmersive experience and to support real-timecollaborations, thereby engaging children(including girls and underrepresented groups)and teachers in the use of advanced technologiesin a manner that organizes educational content,and does so in a context that may further engagechildren in undertaking intrinsically motivatingchallenges.

Fifth, the QA project has an explicit focus onengaging girls, a population that too often hasbeen ignored or overlooked in the design ofcomputer-based environments. QA has manyfeatures that focus on girls, including the incor-poration of narrative and characters, multiplefemale role models, the use of guilds to support

solidarity, the ability to collect objects, and thefacility to customize avatars. Sixth, QA offers aflexibly adaptive curriculum, thereby supportinglocal adaptation and allowing each participatingsite to customize the experience in a way thatmeets its local needs. Seventh is the multidiscipli-nary focus, with QA being a metacontext thatbrings together content from multiple domainsincluding science, math, reading, social studies,and language arts. QA contains multiple worlds,each dedicated to a particular theme and disci-plinary content. For example, EcoWorld con-tains quests related to measuring water quality,understanding different habitats and biodivers-ity, practicing scientific inquiry, and many othertopics related to ecology and the environment.This multidisciplinary content focus of the proj-ect allows for the broad-scale integration of QAin elementary schools. Lastly, QA does not sim-ply involve working on the computer; instead ittargets building connections, with most questsrequiring that participants leave the computerand gather real-world evidence, thus helping toestablish connections among children, parents,schools, after-school centers, families, and com-munities.

QA continues to change in terms of its techni-cal structures and is continually retranslated interms of its local contextualization by individualteachers. In this way, implementation is not aone-to-one mapping or rubber stamping of thedesigned environment to the new context.Instead, future users must always adapt thedesign for their local use, and this adaptationoccurs as part of a larger institutional context.Successful designs are never placed in a blackbox, but instead are continually reinterpreted aspart of the cultural systems in which they arebeing realized (Barab & Luehmann, 2003). Scal-ing up educational initiatives involves carefulattention to the cultural and social process in agiven context— while being based on an effec-tive program. It involves listening, respecting,and adapting to local concerns. QA has beensuccessfully implemented in multiple contexts,including elementary schools and after-schoolcenters, suggesting we have taken steps in theright direction.

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IMPLICATIONS

New technologies, especially the Internet, offermuch potential as vehicles for intercultural col-laborative inquiry, allowing us to develop globalperspectives on local issues and to find complexapproaches to complex problems. However,technology is only a tool— and one that is only aspowerful as we choose to make it. Better under-standing the value of this tool to support learn-ing is a central concern and priority in our work.Further regarding the technology or, in this case,set of technologies as only one part of the overallactivity structure has been a core evolution inour thinking throughout this project. We nowsee ourselves in the business of supporting theemergence of sociotechnical structures so as tosupport a common intersubjective experience,not simply designing technical artifacts. Wehave had to identify the core aspects of ourvision and then determine what types ofresources (situated potentials) would bestengender the local productions of the pedagogi-cal and social commitments that underlie ourwork.

It is our hope that through this project, chil-dren can learn from other cultures in a mannerthat will allow each one of us to grow as individ-uals, as responsible citizens, as loving membersof the human family, and as considerate stew-ards of the earth. It is also our hope that throughparticipation in QA, members will come to valuetheir own communities and recognize not onlythat their communities value them but that theyhave important ways to contribute to their com-munities and the world. Projects such as QA,that value diverse perspectives, foster multi-cultural appreciation, and engage users in dis-tance-mediated collaborations, bear muchpromise and responsibility. It is our hope thatdesigners more generally will take up thechallenge of socially responsive design, bringinga deliberate social agenda to their work.

Our approach to developing a design that sitsat the intersection of entertainment, education,and our social commitments has evolved, andwill continue to evolve as QA scales out, balanc-ing tensions in ways that do not cater to anyextreme yet do justice to all concerned. Moregenerally, we have tried to leverage the motiva-

tional value of games, offering children a safeand meaningful space for play while at the sametime supporting autonomy, agency, collabora-tion, a sense of purpose and consequentiality,and even academic learning. Given thatchildren’s play spaces have been constrainedfrom several square miles to, in some cases, amere electronic screen— and moreover, giventhe potential consequences of this shift inchildren’s activities— it is imperative that theybe provided with the means for safe and produc-tive play. We present this instance of sociallyresponsive design work as one example of tak-ing up this challenge. We look forward to read-ing more from our colleagues on the impact ofthis work on their thinking, on related work thatthey are carrying out, and on how we in the fieldof instructional design can best be of service tothose for (and with) whom we design.

Sasha Barab [[email protected]] is at the School ofEducation, Indiana University, Bloomington. TylerDodge, Robert Carteaux, and Hakan Tuzun are withInstructional Systems Technology, at IndianaUniversity. Michael Thomas is with the Departmentof Educational Psychology at Oklahoma University.Correspondence about the article should beaddressed to Sasha A. Barab, School of Education,Room 2232, 201 N. Rose Ave, Bloomington, IN, 47405. This research was supported in part by a CAREERGrant from the National Science Foundation,REC-9980081 and by the National ScienceFoundation Grant #0092831.

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