As a founding member of Quest to Learn’s design team and a Co-Director School, Arana is daily gratified and humbled to find moments in her day that clearly reflect the intentions underlying the school’s design. Read More »

Boss Level at Quest schools is a two-week intensive school-wide collaboration that closes out the trimester, where students work in teams to solve a difficult design challenge bringing together everything they’ve learned in all their classes. The term Boss Level is borrowed from video games, where, at the end of a level, players prove what [...] Read More »

Atul Varma wants everyone to know how the worldwide web works. He envisions a generation of web makers: people as at home in the code language underlying the web as in the sites and social media tools that sit on its surface. This vision led Varma to spend the last year developing a neat new [...] Read More »

Four eleven-year olds focus their attention on a game board. One girl rolls a set of dice. The boy across from her scribbles something on a sheet of paper, grins, and then exclaims,“The frequency of 7 is the highest, so far!” What? Since when do eleven-year olds discuss frequency while playing a game with such [...] Read More »

With the Institute from the start as a founding member of Quest to Learn’s design team, Rebecca hasn’t stopped pushing herself and others to continue to grow and take on new challenges. This summer, for instance, Rebecca took over the direction of Mission Lab, the Institute’s learning design studio, currently embedded at Quest to Learn. [...] Read More »

About six years ago and six years into a career as a sixth-grade social studies teacher, Rick Brennan noticed he was getting the same questions again and again from his students. He knew what they would ask, when they would ask it, and he was bored. Brennan considered leaving the profession, but instead decided to [...] Read More »

Missed Hive@MozFest last week? No worries, here’s the scoop on all the fun that happened. The Hive Pop-up Experience brought together organizations from New York, Chicago, San Francisco and London to create a “YouthZone” around the tagline, “Less Yack, More Hack.” Leah Gilliam, Program Manager for Informal Learning at Institute of Play, described it as [...] Read More »

Happen to be in London for the weekend? Check out the 2011 Mozilla Festival. The festival brings together web developers, journalists, filmmakers, gamers, educators and activists to reinvent media online and explore how the open web connects us in a creative and collaborative manner. Read More »

We’re excited to announce the launch of two new after-school pilot programs this fall at Quest to Learn. Funded in part by The Hive Digital Media Learning Fund at The New York Community Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the programs challenge and empower students to take on roles as scientists, engineers, designers, inventors, journalists, [...] Read More »

Game designers, who must capture and retain players’ attention and interest quickly, need to understand human psychology and culture. Read More »

This fall we welcome the newest member of the network: CICS Chicago Quest! Teachers from Quest to Learn school in NYC contributed to a three-week professional development intensive workshop to help get new teachers in Chicago up to speed on the Quest curriculum model. Read More »

GRINDING LENSES, a collaboration with the National Writing Project, and Indiana and DePaul Universities, brought master teachers and students together to learn an innovative new pedagogy based on design, collaboration and systems thinking. Teachers became avid systems thinkers, and students gained proficiency as designers, philosophers, writers and activists. Read More »

Rising 6th graders learned basic principles of game design at MOBILE QUEST, a mobile game design day camp in its third year. They used those principles to create mobile games for the iPhone using ARIS, a GPS-enabled mobile game design platform. Meanwhile, older kids dug deeper into programming at the DESIGN ART CODE camp, held at Quest to Learn in NYC. Read More »

This summer at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC, the ArtLab+ Game Design day camp introduced kids to the myriad nuances of art interpretation through the lens of game design. Running concurrently in NYC, the month-long camp Click@MOMA challenged kids to explore game design as an emerging frontier in the field of art making Read More »

What Starcraft and Angry Birds can teach us about problem-solving, logic, and thought itself. Read More »