School for Digital Kids

The first game Katie Salen invented was a board game based on The Hobbit; she was 8 years old, a sporty outdoors girl in Arvada, Colorado. Now in her early forties, Salen is a renowned and self-taught game designer. Convinced that the inherent nature of games makes them a felicitous teaching tool, she is actively using her skills to teach students and develop curriculums.

Recalling her first university post in the 1990s, she says, “I began bringing in games to help my students learn how to engage people. I realized that when the students were able to analyze games and really understood how they worked, it was the very best way to teach them interactive design.”

In 2007 Salen (below) and other game designers set up the non-profit Institute of Play to create games for personal and social development. In 2009 the institute developed Quest to Learn (Q2L), a New York City public school that is the first in the nation to teach “digital kids” through playing and designing games. The school was developed in partnership with the New York City Department of Education (DOE).

“There had been a lot of talk around game-based learning,” Salen says, “but schools in general are incredibly resistant to any kind of innovation, whether it’s games or technology. I felt it would not go anywhere unless we built a school as a demonstration site.”

Although it is too early to say how successful Q2L will be, a 2010 DOE survey found that 97 percent of the students were fully engaged in the classroom and with the curriculum—a level of attention I found when I visited the school. Equally impressive: A team of Q2L’s sixth and seventh graders won the New York City Math Olympiad Tournament this year, playing against teams of mostly eighth graders.

By 2015 Q2L will be both a middle and a high school; it currently has 232 students in sixth through eighth grade occupying two floors in the sprawling Bayard Rustin Educational Complex on West 18th Street in Manhattan. Parents and prospective students are invited to an open house, where the school’s philosophy and teaching methods are explained. Students are then chosen by lottery. Roughly a third of the current students are Hispanic, a third are African-American, and a third are Caucasian. However, the gender balance is askew: 150 boys to only 82 girls, which suggests that boys are opting for Q2L’s game-based education at almost twice the rate of girls.

This past September, Salen opened another Quest school in Chicago, where she is now Professor of Games and Digital Media at DePaul University. (She commutes to Manhattan to work with Q2L and her Institute.) There are also plans to create two more schools, but creating freestanding digital schools is not the goal. The aim is for existing schools to adapt the Quest curriculum and materials to suit their needs. This summer Salen ran a month-long training camp for teachers from around the country, and she is looking for funding to set up a Quest teacher-training academy.

Game Theory in the Classroom

Q2L’s organizing principle is based on systems thinking (understanding how things interact and influence each other within a whole), the teaching of which had to be tweaked: “After the first year we found we’d been over-ambitious in what sixth graders could learn about systems thinking—feedback loops, for example,” Salen says. “So we scaled it back, but the big vision and framework are, remarkably, still in place.”

Classes are called domains: “The Way Things Work” (science and math); “Codeworlds” (English and math); “Being, Space and Place” (English and social studies), among others. A team of game designers, curriculum specialists, and teachers create the curriculum, such as 12-week game-like lesson plans called ‘Missions.’

But technology is only one tool for learning. In the Ghost v. Ghost Mission (designed by the Institute of Play and teacher Limor Levy), for example, students are introduced to the ghosts (historical figures) via video and to their guide via Twitter; they film each other acting out historical vignettes from their own scripts, read primary materials, keep historical journals from various points of view, and are expected to write rigorous essays.

The curriculum also contains modules that prepare students for taking standardized state tests. “What we don’t do is give over two months where kids are doing nothing but pure test prep,” Salen says, “we don’t think that’s the best thing for kids.”

During my visit it took 40 minutes for the first digital anything to appear; the students were in their Home Base (advisory groups), busily engaged in old-fashioned conversation. The advisory groups have around 10 students who meet once or twice a day with the same adviser throughout their school career. The average class size is 22 students.

Laptops, the most ubiquitous bits of technology, are kept in mobile carts and handed out as needed. In one class, I saw students use them for about 15 minutes to play a math game and to check their Canvas accounts, where teachers comment on work and post grades and assignments. In another, they spent the 40-minute period playing a game designed to teach grammar and took turns for one-on-one conferences with their teachers, one of whom was a special-education teacher.

Almost a quarter of Q2L students have physical or learning disabilities—a considerably higher percentage than the average (just over 14%) for the 40 demographically similar public schools in a comparison group. Yet the English and math proficiency at Q2L is the highest in this group.

The school places great value on collaborative learning and what Salen calls “productive failure.” “One thing gamers learn how to do is to have theories about how things work,” she says. “You test them out, you fail a lot, but that doesn’t kick you out of the game; it gives you information about how to solve the problem. That’s a pretty interesting way of thinking about being a learner: embracing failure as a tool.”

Not surprisingly, Salen is constantly invited to explain the Quest model at conferences and think tanks. She laughs when I ask if she has time for a personal life: “The past couple of years have been pretty intense,” she says, “it’s been a singular focus. But I do have a family, a boyfriend—no kids of my own, but lots of nieces and nephews...”