Our Learning Model


Career Pathways
A principle learning goal of Quest to Learn is to offer students 21st century academic and career pathways, with design and innovation at their core. We offer three main career pathways: Game Design, Bioinformatics, and Information Visualization. These pathways all support work with complex systems, which we believe is a key driver of change in the 21st century. Competencies to assess career pathway learning are being designed on trajectories parallel to Q2L’s grades 6-12 knowledge domains.

  1. Game Design: design and production of game-based experiences and tools, including game development, game programming, game art, and game writing. (e.g., by the end of high school students may serve as a principal game designer on a game design team developing an application for the Nintendo DS)


  2. Bioinformatics: design lab and interactive data mining experiments to explore systems biology genomics and its connectivity to life problems. (e.g. by the end of the 10th grade students, working independently, are able to use specialized search tool software to analyze a series of DNA bases to determine the sequence that demonstrates a mutation)


  3. Information Visualization: designing representations of complex information in visual, spatial, and interactive forms for the purpose of analysis and communication. (e.g., by the end of the 8th grade students conduct a research study for which they present findings using a host of visual analytics tools (concept maps, scatter plots, contour maps) to explicate data.

The following criteria led to the selection of our career pathways:

  1. They align with a systems perspective, allowing students to continually develop systemic reasoning skills
  2. They afford a design perspective of iteration, prototyping, and testing
  3. They allow for the integration of new media technologies as strategies for understanding, analysis, and theory-building
  4. They offer clear college and career pathways in areas of future growth, supported within academic and industry contexts
  5. They align to various design, technology, and science-related growth industries as identified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics
  6. They allow for content interdisciplinarity
  7. They map to our knowledge domains

These career paths are also explicitly designed to offer our students both competitive entry into either selective colleges or entry-level post-high school employment.