In This Vision of Education’s Future, Games Hold the Key

Welcome to ChicagoQuest charter school.

It can be loud here.

And if you hope to embrace a vision of schooling that puts children in control of team projects immersed in the world of digital information, social networks and games, you’d better get used to it.

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Here’s how it’s supposed to work: You start with new national Common Core Standards and plot out your students’ learning targets across the school’s grade span.

Then you take the imaginations of your teachers and team them twice weekly with your game designers—both video games and board games—and tech wizards.

Together they shape a body of lessons into an ambitious “quest” with a series of “missions,” says the school’s curriculum specialist, Patrick Hoover.

One of the recent missions combined math and writing on individual computers as sixth-graders created story lines in helping a fictional world, “Digiton,” return to rationality in part by exterminating irrational numbers.