New School Opens With Videogames as Instructors

A new school in Manhattan has decided not to fight the fact that kids like videogames. In fact, the school is embracing it.

Quest to Learn, which opened in September with its first class of sixth graders, is a school designed to teach students using videogame-inspired activities almost exclusively. The goal is to keep the kids engaged, something that teachers sometimes fail to do. The school is the first for the Institute of Play, a non-profit endeavor that brings game designers and education experts together to create games for a learning curriculum. The Institute of Play is funded by the MacArthur Foundation and was created three years ago.

According to an article in PopSci:

This year’s 72-student class is split into four groups that rotate through five courses during the day: Codeworlds (math/English), Being, Space and Place (social studies/English), The Way Things Work (math/science), Sports for the Mind (game design), and Wellness (health/PE). Instead of slogging through problem sets, students learn collaboratively in group projects that require an understanding of subjects in the New York State curriculum. The school’s model draws on 30 years of research showing that people learn best when they’re in a social context that puts new knowledge to use. Kids learn more by, say, pretending to be Spartan spies gathering intel on Athens than by memorizing facts about ancient Greece.

The plan is take the first set of sixth graders all the way through high school, and admit a new set of sixth graders every year. The goal is to get students ready for a workplace that is increasingly dependent upon computers, even if the students choose a field not directly related to videogames.

And while the school's curriculum is different, the students are still required to pass all the traditional standardized tests. According to Gregg Betheil, the New York Department of Education driector that helped Quest's application:

“We need new ways to create a passion for learning. The planning has been extremely thoughtful. It seemed like a chance worth taking.”

(Image courtesy of PopSci and Claudio Midolo)