Q2L: The First Three Weeks

Each week the curriculum team at Q2L puts out The Relay, a email newsletter that shares with parents the goings on in school that week. Below are excerpts from The Relay for the first three amazing weeks of Q2L's launch.

WEEK 1
September 9, 2009, was a very special day for Quest to Learn (Q2L) and its founding partner the Institute of Play! We opened Q2L's doors and the students came streaming in. They carried backpacks, summer projects, supply bags and hopes for what the first day of school would hold. Although there were many new faces, there were familiar ones as well, as Q2L welcomed many alumnae from the Institute of Play's Gaming SMALLab and Mobile Quest projects.

Q2L opened with a special curriculum designed to welcome the students to their new school and learning community. "Circle Up," "Break it Down," and "The Settlers" were the themes used to welcome the students and introduce them to the goals and guiding principles of the day. During these first three days, games, learning activities, domain classes and advisories were targeted to help students explore team-work, respect and discover the quirks and characteristics of the individuals who make up their new community.

The self-named "q-dents" created a Q2L team charter, a "smartool" to help learn one another's names and developed a very personal understanding of how individuals are components of systems and that systems have many interesting, interdependent components. The first three days ended with a bang, with students eating cake, trying on their new Q2L t-shirts in a celebration of their new school and its first week.

WEEK 2
It has been an exciting first full week of school at Q2L! Students continued to meet with their Home Base advisors daily, and we had morning meeting on Monday and Friday. During Monday’s morning meeting one of our students introduced the idea of a Q2L YouTube channel, and there was an overwhelming response from students – so much so that we are putting together a lunchtime club on two different days so that we can accommodate the large number of students who are interested. During Friday’s morning meeting we began our practice of a weekly silent meeting, which is a time for our community to come together and engage in self-reflection.

Students also spent their first full week in their domain classes, where their teachers introduced them to their first trimester’s missions. To read a summary from each teacher of what students have been working on for weeks two and three, click here.

Codeworlds
This week in Codeworlds, our students applied to Systemia Academy, a school designed to train the best and brightest codebreakers. We completed applications to the academy, which included whole number operations, place value, estimation and rounding, fractions, parts of speech and sentence structure. We will continue to work towards a final acceptance into the academy, with a final challenge of repairing incorrect pages in our Codebreakers’ Handbook. These pages will help us begin our work with new math and ELA concepts. Students should be thinking about how math and the English language are examples of code, or a way we communicate the meaning of ideas. (update by Alicia)

Wellness
This week students "unpacked" the Wellness motto: Be the best that you can be so that you can do everything you want to do. They interviewed adults who are part of the Quest to Learn community to find out about ways that the people who work at Q2L support students in being their best. The students worked in teams and each took on a role of either Interviewer, Public Relations person, Secretary/Time Keeper or Videographer. This week students also began reflecting in their personal journals about where their own support comes from and how they themselves function as a team member. At least once a week, there will be specific questions for students to answer in their personal journals, but they are encouraged to write in it as often as they would like. (update by Lara)

The Way Things Work
This week a science video was unexpectedly interrupted by "The Troggles,” a community of small creatures who like to invent things (but are not very good at it). Students discovered that the Troggles hid a packet of materials inside of the classroom. The packet contained a series of letters explaining their particular situation and a plea for help with their problematic inventions. Throughout the week, students worked on ID badges, wrote responses to the Troggles’ questions, and showed the Troggles how well they can think abstractly by interpreting and analyzing a mysterious diagram, which turned out to be a technical diagram of a Slurpee Machine. The week concluded with the students working in groups to make videos introducing themselves to the Troggles. (update by Ameer)

Being, Space & Place
This week students began to explore the role of cartographers (map-makers). Using their newfound skills and knowledge of map-making, groups have been exploring the space of the BSP room so that they can record it on a formal map. These maps, once completed, will become a major document that will be entered into a Q2L time capsule, not to be opened until June of 2016! (update by Ross)

Sports for the Mind
This week we launched our Mission: to repair games for the Gamestar Mechanic Factory. Q2L students have been invited to become apprentice game mechanics by Samson, the head of the Council of Master Mechanics. In preparation for several quests centered on the space of games, students have been playing and analyzing Connect Four (a turn-based grid game) and the more familiar game, Checkers. Next week, we will begin "modding" these games and "breaking them down" as an introduction to more detailed and difficult analysis of other games. Several groups of students have been playing a large-scale version of Checkers as an interesting twist on the game space. (update by Al)

On the technical front, we are prepping the student netbooks (laptop computers) and loading many exciting software programs for use throughout the curriculum (Google SketchUp, to name just one).

WEEK 3
Codeworlds
This week in Codeworlds, we worked to finish the last piece of our application to Systemia. Students worked together to correct all five "broken" documents, which summarized prior math and English knowledge. This week, we signed our Systemia Academy Agreements and officially began our first training in the art of code breaking (very exciting stuff)! We are working on encoding and decoding a specific type of code: a Shift or Caesar Cipher, which will reveal various patterns involved with code making and breaking. We have also received our first case, entitled a Mysteriously Mysterious Mystery that deals with an unusual disappearance with an even more unusual mathematician. Students should be thinking about the patterns within certain ciphers, or codes, and how they can be interpreted in many ways. (update by Alicia)

Being, Space, & Place
This week students finished mapping their sections of the BSP Domain space. Together, these sections completed an offical map of their classroom - complete with a legend, an accurate compass, and a true-to-life scale. Students used these skills to map out the rest of their school, specifically their homebase rooms. These documents and more will be placed in our Q2L 2016 time capsule, which will be locked during Morning Meeting on Friday. (update by Ross)

Sports for the Mind
The students have gotten a preview of the Gamestar Mechanic online game design portal in preparation for our roll out of this exciting program next week. Each student will be given a unique password to access their own account from this web site. Gamestar Mechanic will be a large focus during this first trimester Mission and we are so excited to have unrestricted access to it. In addition, the students have started using their Game Design Journals to record their sketches, drawings, collages, clippings and snippits related to game design. For homework, students are analyzing the SPACE of a particular board game or video game of their choice and the have been given a template for this purpose. Their analysis will include both a drawing and written component. (update by Al)

Wellness
This week students explored the idea of trust. Who do they trust? What makes someone trustworthy? Do they think people trust them? Last week Lara read a mysterious personal blog that someone had left on a computer screen at the library across the street. It seemed there was someone named Pleku who wanted very badly to compete in the Mind Balance Olympiad but was feeling frustrated because she? he? (we just don't know) didn't understand the coach's instructions very well. Lara had commented on Pleku's blog that she and her students might be able to help and this week Pleku wrote an angry email back. He thinks that Lara is a spy for the other team and doesn't want to tell her anything. So students wrote scripts for a video that will convince Pleku that we are indeed who we say we are and that we are ready and willing to help Pleku with training strategies. Over the weekend students should be practicing Pleku's challenge--balancing on one leg while closing their eyes--in order to offer Pleku their own personal insights next week. (update by Lara)

The Way Things Work
This week the Troggles contacted the students, leaving clues that helped lead to the discovery of yet another package hidden in the classroom. The package contained "blueprints", pipe cleaners, and a letter asking the students to help them out with their latest dilemma. The plans left to the Troggles by their lead architect who has mysteriously disappeared contain only vague and whacky measurements leaving the students with a lot of work to do. So far this week, students have received their "Journal of experiments". This notebook will document the students work and progress especially while working on "experiments". The activities this week have included creating "Knowledge Inventories" which visually depict students' knowledge and understanding of a topic, creating houses from the Troggle Blueprints using pipe cleaners, measuring and creating blueprints including specific dimensions (metric and customary). (update by Ameer)