M O R E
Learning
E N V I R O N M E N T S
COURTESY LISA DAWLEY
COURTESY LISA DAWLEY
Quest-based learning may also include chat rooms, websites and other interactive tools.
For example, one assignment (now a quest) in her popular culture class asks students to list five fads and five trends, and then explain their choices in a sentence or two. She’s used a variation of that assignment for years, she said, but this year she received a lot of positive feedback about it from the students. She attributes the change not only to the assignment’s designation as a quest or game, but also to student opinions about the quest that are actively sought through the software and students who may not enjoy such a quest being able to skip it and choose another. That ability to make your own choice as a student is key, she said. “It pulls you forward through the curriculum, rather than pushing you forward,” Waldenberger said, adding that she’s looking at it as both a teacher and as a student in the summer workshop. “It makes you really curious about what’s around the next corner. Yet, it’s just a different way of organizing and presenting the same material.”
A Focus on Exploration Student feedback and the teacher ’s ability to listen to it and react appropriately are extraordinarily important to success in using the tool and can make the student experience especially rewarding. 16 | BOISESTATE.EDU
A Skype connection allows students who live hundreds of miles apart to easily “meet” face to face. “The point of this is to give students academic freedom to seek out their interests,” Haskell said. “The danger comes when teachers put themselves on an island and expect they’ll be the font of all knowledge for their students. It’s just not compatible with this model and creates frustration for everyone.” Accepting feedback also is central to Dawley’s and Haskell’s ongoing development of 3D GameLab. The
mathematical learning models and design a system to help inform teachers and students when they are on the right path, and make suggestions along the way to improve their learning experiences.” While the concept of making learning fun is an old one, Dawley and Haskell are pursing it with new ideas, new technology and a new approach that is making the educational technology world sit up and take notice. “Those who do not know (Dawley) personally have read her work; those who do know her personally have sought her out and chosen to work with her because of her educational expertise, her core research agenda and her vision,” said Kent State’s Ferdig. Creating technology that makes it possible to bring quest-based learning into practically any classroom is just the beginning. Making that technol-
“The point of this is to give students academic freedom to seek out their interests.” – Chris Haskell summer workshops and undergraduate classes are a gold mine of data on how students and teachers interact with the software, which Dawley and Haskell use to make refinements to the software. “We are using the data and text mining to create an intelligent learning technology that tracks, monitors and logs every behavior,” said Dawley. “When we sort through the data sets we find what leads to success and what leads to failure. Using that knowledge, we can create predictive
ogy accessible not only to students, but also to the teacher is the real key to the success of 3D GameLab. “As our society increasingly uses interactive digital media, both at work and in play, understanding the strengths and limits of these media is vital,” said Dr. Chris Dede, the Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard University, in a recent endorsement of Dawley and the research. “Thus, her work is very important for the evolution and transformation of education.”