Icarus Studios News

Quests and Teaching

(Continued from Part 1)

If you read the first part of this post, you know that I had a positive experience with an informal virtual teaching situation. The students were assigned some very general exploration tasks in an existing multi-user virtual world; later, I met with them in that same world to chat about their experiences. Although it took place online and inside a virtual world, the meetings were really just an extension of real-world teaching techniques—the questions I asked them and the general nature of the conversations didn’t differ significantly from the conversations I’d like to have with them during my regular office hours or in class. However, virtual worlds and MMOs present more teaching opportunities than a glorified chat room with 3D avatars. Second Life, where our conversations took place, gives its users many interactivity tools and opportunities to create their own environments, but it lacks the structure that’s already found in multi-player role-playing games. Games like these rely on a highly developed quest system to which instructors can apply current pedagogical models—switching to the virtual environment doesn’t mean throwing out existing, effective teaching methods.

The general quest structure, which involves problem-obstacle-reward, can be applied to many teaching situations, depending on the topic at hand. The initial problem of a quest need only be tailored to suit the needs of a teaching point. Problem-solving situations that employs physical interaction makes sense, as games give players access to an interactive, “physical” world. The problems which a student must solve can be as large or as small as needed for the subject, and the quest structures can always support breaking complex problems into simpler, more manageable parts, so that students aren’t overwhelmed by too detailed an undertaking all at once. Initial quest seeds are often presented in the context of a larger storyline, giving players a thread that links one action to the next, and each smaller task completes some part of the greater narrative. The chained quest structure gives students an understanding of the overarching context surrounding the task at hand, so that they don’t end up questioning the relevance of a given activity—it’s clear how parts fit into the whole because they’ve actually experienced it for themselves.

Contextualizing activities like this also gives students a hook to learning beyond rote memorization of facts and processes. Context adds depth to learning; this gives students both motivation and means for easier recall. For example, take the case of a student learning a foreign language. Memorizing lists of vocabulary is boring. Learning declensions and conjugations in a grammatical void is mind-numbing. But realistic situations that require communication make the vocabulary list meaningful: “In order to buy food in this market, I need to know these words and how to use them in this sentence structure.” Realistic situations also give students a hook; the skills and materials they’ve learned are closer to what they’d have from gained first-hand experience, which helps augment what they would know from the textbook or classroom lectures. Instead of trying to remember what the instructor said in class or what was on page 242 of the text, they have access to spatial, experiential memory. They can think in terms of personal experience: “When I tried this, it didn’t work. But when I did this, it worked great.”

(Continued in Part 3)

-Jason Cisarano, Virtual Worlds Team