Overview

What does it mean to know, and how do educators best support learning? These questions have been under debate since Aristotle, and quite likely even before that. At the very core of this debate is a quarrel about the relationship between person and environment, between knowing and meaning, between content and context. In the three worked examples included here, we advance a vision of knowing that focuses specifically on transformational play; how individuals and environments develop, push on, and change one another through meaningful inquiry (Connell, 1996; Dewey, 1938; Dewey & Bentley, 1960).

The worked examples presented here are stand-alone worlds and game missions situated within Quest Atlantis, a multi-user virtual environment (Barab, Jackson, & Arici, 2004; Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Tuzun, & Carteaux, 2004; Barab, Dodge, Thomas, Jackson, & Tuzun, 2007). Quest Atlantis (QA) is a learning and teaching space that uses a 3D multi-user environment to immerse children, ages 9-14, in educational tasks (see http://QuestAtlantis.org). QA is an immersive context designed primarily for use in schools with over 15,000 registered members worldwide. The project is intended to engage children in a form of dramatic play comprising both online and off-line learning activities, with a storyline inspiring a disposition towards social action.

Quest Atlantis and Transformational Play

Transformational play describes a strategy for situating the learner and curricular content within a play context. Specifically, transformational play involves positioning students as active protagonists who interact with game characters and virtual environments to identify and solve personally meaningful problems. More than sugar-coating content to coerce disempowered students into caring about disciplinary knowledge, games can establish worlds where children are transformed into empowered scientists, doctors, reporters, and mathematicians who have to understand disciplinary content to accomplish desired ends.

And, more than speculative application whose value is controlled by the teacher, the game world is changed, for better or for worse, based on the depth of student understandings and resultant choices. For example, if a learner in one of the games we have designed chooses to use the mode as opposed to the median to interpret a particular data set, they will initiate a different storyline than if they had acted through another interpretative tool. Or, in another curriculum, children might decide to focus on erosion as the cause of a water quality problem, and thus remove loggers from the park, setting in motion a storyline that improves the river quality to some extent, but leads to financial bankruptcy for the park.

Designing for transformational play involves experientially situating students and concepts within a virtual world. As we design these play spaces, we create narratives that (1) bind content with person by creating legitimate dilemmas that can only be resolved by accurately using disciplinary formalisms; (2) bind person with context by positioning players as agents-of-change whose intentional actions have impact on the context and storyline; (3) bind context with content by highlighting the consequentiality of one's actions through contexts that change in response to students' decisions. In particular, within Quest Atlantis we focus examine how we can meaningfully position content, person, and context in a manner that has the potential to transform all three and, more generally, transform current notions of what constitutes a curriculum.

With a goal of illuminating the curricular value and technological possibility of transformational play, we have included discussion of three curricular units, noting the challenges and affordances of different content areas in supporting an integration of content, person, and context. We encourage the reader to explore the three worked examples, and reflect on how each one highlights our notion of transformational play. Also, if the reader wishes to gain first-hand experience with the actual work, please apply for a guest account to the Quest Atlantis project to experience the designs directly.

An Overview of Quest Atlantis

Building on the model of online role-playing games, QA combines strategies used in the commercial gaming environment with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation (Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Carteaux, & Tuzun, 2004; Barab, Dodge, Thomas, Jackson, & Tuzun, 2007). The core elements of QA include, a 3D multi-user virtual environment (see Figure 1), an unfolding storyline involving a mythical Council and a set of social commitments, a customizable homepage and various trajectories through which a player's character can evolve, inquiry learning activities, including Quests, missions, zones, and even simulated worlds, and a globally-distributed community of 15,000 participants who log in from five countries.

Through Quest Atlantis, players can travel to virtual places to perform various educational activities, talk with other users and mentors, and build virtual personae. The QA virtual environment, storyline, associated structures, explicit social commitments, and social policies constitute what is referred to as a meta-game context, a genre of play in which an overarching structure lends form, cohesion, and meaning to a collection of nested activities, each with its own identifiable rules and challenges (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004). As students complete these various activities, their game character visibly "luminates" on core social commitments, representing an increased functionality (i.e., their game character can perform previously inaccessible behaviors) and characterizing participation in terms of the foundational storyline (Barab, Dodge, Tuzun, et al., 2007). Further, within constraints assigned by one's teacher, each player can evolve her character based on personal interests and priorities such that after two months of participation, players rarely have similar game experiences and character profiles. Also, because of the program's multi-user nature, finding players with particular profiles becomes a useful means for completing various activities and advancing the unfolding narrative.

---

Worked Example # 1: Modern Prometheus

Overview of Example. Modern Prometheus is a relatively new addition to Quest Atlantis. Begun as a collaboration with Doug Thomas at USC, Modern Prometheus was developed with the goal of better understanding the potential of converting a classic piece of literature, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, into a transformational play space. Modern Prometheus world best highlights the potential of designing for intentionality by coupling person and context, with players being explicitly positioned as agents of change whose purpose is to help "Dr. Frank" to heal the town. Through this coupling, players grapple with the role that ethics play in science and technology, and consider whether "the ends justify the means" in a particular situation. Given our desire to demonstrate the use of QA in schools, a further goal entailed connecting with supporting national standards for persuasive writing and decision-making, as they are required to justify particular game decisions. In this way, the disciplinary content of the game (persuasive writing) became a tool that could be leveraged in order to accomplish one's desired ends (determining whether it is OK to create life to save life). The unit consists of six missions, beginning with setting up the problem to be investigated and ending with students having to make the decision of whether the Doctor's creation is "human" and if its life should be saved.

View the Worked Example with comments from Jim Gee and Henry Jenkins.

---

Worked Example # 2: Taiga Fishkill

Overview of Example. The Taiga Fishkill unit is an interactive narrative set within an aquatic habitat (the Taiga Park) where a serious ecological problem has resulted in many fish dying.; In the unit, students navigate through the virtual park and interact with other players and non-player characters who communicate their perspective on the problem. Taiga best exemplifies the potential for connecting content with context by supporting students' experience of the consequentiality of their actions. For example, after students have begun to learn about potential causes of the fish demise in Taiga Park, they are asked to make a recommendation about how to resolve the issue. In making this decision, students have to consider their conceptual tools (i.e. understanding eutrophication, erosion, and overfishing) in order to make a recommendation about what to do (i.e. stop the indigenous people from farming, tell the loggers they can no longer cut trees in the park, or shut down the game fishing company). In making these decisions, students engage in projective consequentiality: they have to consider what their use of particular tools tells them about the context that they are working with. After making a recommendation, students travel 20 years forward in game time, and see the results of their recommendations (experiential consequentiality). At that point students are asked to reflect on the implications of their disciplinary recommendations on the context, thus serving to re-couple content with context.

View the Worked Example

---

Worked Example # 3: Campaigns in Ander City

Overview of Example. The Ander City unit positions students as statistical consultants hired to help address some dilemmas that the city is currently having. Students help the mayor, who is up for re-election and running under a campaign of innovation. His opponent is challenging the mayor's innovative agenda, claiming that traditional methods of running the city are superior and he has the data to prove it. Desperate for help and to ensure that he really is making good decisions for his city, the mayor enlists players to become statistical consultants who can help him stand up for his beliefs--or change them if he must. The unit targets three key ideas: 1) different statistical tools can reveal different insights into data; 2) statistical tools can be used opportunistically to support different perspectives; and 3) beliefs can shape interpretations of results. Ander City best exemplifies the potential of linking person with content by creating dilemmas which position content as a legitimate tool that can be leveraged to address problems. For example students learn how to use statistical tools such as mean, median, and mode, and also learn how these tools work as mechanisms for making decisions about the world as they attempt to reconcile two different possible interpretations of distinct data sets. As they make increasing numbers of recommendations, students advance through a professional trajectory, eventually becoming master statisticians. In this way, their disciplinary actions are coupled closely with their own progress in the game.

View the Worked Example

Development of these worked examples has advanced our concept of transformational play, which involves positioning concepts and learners within rich, interactive systems. This positioning transforms concepts from abstracted facts into conceptual tools that operate and transform those very same narratives that imbued the concepts with worth. Through game play, as one develops a relationship with (or projects oneself into) a player-character, the individual is extended into another world--one that is virtual but that has real-world implications (Gadamer, 1975). By creating an opportunity for students to engage with curricular content in this way, the spaces of QA allow the student to test conjectures, act upon them, and witness the consequences of their actions, making visible the functional utility of one's understanding (Barab, Zuiker, et al., 2007).

More than a simulation, QA is fun; like many games, it allows students to become someone and do things that they are unlikely to do in the "real world." During play, students engage a space of possibility, negotiating rules and roles and discovering the challenges and potentialities for growth within and across the boundaries of fantasy and "reality." Through play, they transcend the borders of reality; it is this potential that, in our opinion, gives play the power to expand the learner's conceptual and personal zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978). In the types of play spaces we develop, the learner becomes a character that engages in storylines and takes on roles that the learner would not in real life. For example, becoming a statistician, a scientist, or a doctor. These opportunities are not present in most K-12 classrooms.

Our hope for the future is that schools using QA focus more on engaging students in the game (narrative particulars) and less on providing them the manual (disembodied universals). It is important to note that we are not arguing against lectures or explicit content presentation in general, but instead are concerned that schools have traditionally privileged abstractions and generalizations over particulars to a point that is becoming problematic. Additionally, we believe that schools, in their efforts to reproduce existing structures, often alienate those they were intended to engage. Here, we are offering an alternative type of curriculum, one that is experientially consequential and personally transformative, both playful and serious, and that takes learning quite seriously.

Aristotle & Butcher, S. H. (Trans.) (330 B.C./1992). Poetics. In H. Adams (Ed.), Critical theory since Plato (Revised ed., pp. 49-66). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.
Barab, S. A. & S., Roth, W.-M. (2006). Intentionally-Bound Systems and Curricular-Based Ecosystems: An Ecological Perspective on Knowing. Educational Researcher, 35(5), 3-13.
Barab, S. A., & Duffy, T. (2000). From practice fields to communities of practice. In D. Jonassen, & S. M. Land. (Eds.). Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments (pp. 25-56). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Barab, S. A., Arici, A., Jackson, C. (2005). Eat your vegetables and do your homework: A design-based investigation of enjoyment and meaning in learning. Educational Technology 65(1), 15-21.
Barab, S. A., Dodge, T., & Ingram-Goble, A. (2006). Conceptual play spaces: A 21st Century pedagogy. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.
Barab, S. A., Dodge, T., Thomas, M, Jackson, C., & Tuzun, H. (2007). Our designs and the social agendas they carry. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 16(2), 263-305.
Barab, S. A., Hay, K. E., Barnett, M. G., & Squire, K. (2001). Constructing virtual worlds: Tracing the historical development of learner practices/understandings. Cognition and Instruction, 19(1), 47–94.
Barab, S. A., Sadler, T., Heiselt, C., Hickey, D., Zuiker, S. (2007). Relating Narrative, Inquiry, and Inscriptions: A Framework for Socio-Scientific Inquiry. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 16(1), 59-82.
Barab, S. A., Thomas, M, Dodge, T., Carteaux, R., & Tuzun, H. (2005). Making learning fun: Quest Atlantis, a game without guns. Educational Technology Research and Development 53(1), 86–108.
Barab, S. A., Zuiker, S., Warren, S., Hickey, D., Ingram-Goble, A., Kwon, E-J., Kouper, I., & Herring, S. C. (in press). Situationally embodied curriculum: Relating formalisms and contexts. To appear in Science Education.
Dewey, J. (1938/1963). Experience and education. New York: Collier MacMillan.
Dewey, J. & Bentley, A. F. (1949). Knowing and the known. Boston: Beacon.
Gresalfi, M. S., & Cobb, P. (2006). Cultivating students’ discipline-specific dispositions as a critical goal for pedagogy and equity. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 1, 49-58.
Salen, K. & Zimmerman, E. (2004). Rules of play. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.