Video Game-Based Learning

I won't lie, when I saw this article last night while watching Monday Night Football, it made me forget about how awful the New York Giants are this year for almost an entire quarter.  It didn't take long for an Eli Manning interception to snap me out of it, but the Quest 2 Learn (Q2L) school in Manhattan utilizes an innovative education model that really intrigues me.  Q2L, which launched in 2009, says that their main goal is to ditch your traditional idea of school, and instead implement a "translation of the underlying form of games into a powerful pedagogical model for its 6-12th graders."   The school has designed its curriculum to try and emulate the way that players “take on” the identities of the character who they are controlling in a video game.  Instead of taking on the trivial role of a plumber who can fight turtles, play tennis, and race go-karts, the students instead take on the roles of "explorers, mathematicians, historians, writers, and evolutionary biologists as they work through a dynamic, challenge-based curriculum with content-rich questing to learn at its core." 

Here I was thinking that I was making a big stretch arguing that games have a place next to traditional texts in an English classroom-- this school argues that video games ARE the classroom, as they offer a "rule-based learning system" that is both creative and effective.  The students don't just sit around playing all day though- while they do play some commercial video games (which are deemed educational), they also write "in-character" journals or blogs, do live action role playing, conduct research on the web, and design entire video games themselves.   Its unique approach has not gone unnoticed, as even the New York Times has a huge write up on the school's successes.

This school has to be seen to be believed:  Here is the overview of the curriculum from the school's website, where you will see that the English Language Arts fall under what the school calls the "Codeworlds" domain (classes).  If you look at the core values of this domain, it seems to me that the stress on literacy of English language is to better understand code, which is the gateway to creating worlds and conveying a message through a game.  If this is the case, then I think the school is doing a great disservice to its students.  Our canonical texts, our YA lit and, in the case of my argument, certain video games all provide readers/players with so much information about where humans have been, where we are now, and where we can go.   We only tell the stories that matter most to us, that can change us, that portray human emotions, fears, and struggles.  Even though literacy in code is the only way to produce a working video game, neglecting traditional literature and narrative games will not allow students the exposure to fictional works that display human behavior best.  Role-playing as a historian can only teach you so much if you have no desire to pursue a career along these lines, whereas following Huck Finn as he goes down the river with Jim, or helping Ike from the Fire Emblem series lead in place of his recently deceased father, these fictional accounts can offer much more relatable roles for teens to play as. 

All that being said, this is literally the third year of the school's existence.  The initial group of 6th graders is now moving on to the 8th grade, and will continue attending until they graduate from 12th grade.  It is possible that reading fictional literature or playing through narrative games is just not on the curriculum yet, and is reserved for when the students are more mature.  Only time will tell.