I've never gone to a school quite like it.

>>Well, we get to design games and play each other's games,

so instead of just doing work, work, work all day.

>>Well, we have the basic classes of a school,

but we gave them different names, like math is called Code World.

Science is the Way Things Work.

>>We learn everything that all the other schools learn.

We just learn it differently.

>>My name's Katie Salen and I wear a couple of different hats.

One, I'm a professor at Parsons, the New School of Design and I teach

in a program there called Designing Technology.

I also run a nonprofit called the Institute of Play, which is a games

and learning space where we develop all kinds of stuff

around games and learning.

And then my last hat is, I'm an executive director of design

at this new middle school called Quest to Learn in New York City.

>>Quest to Learn is a new sixth grade through twelfth grade public school

that opened in New York City in Fall 2009, and it's a school

that has the tagline, school for digital kids.

And all that means is that we believe that kids can and do learn

in different ways outside of school, often via access to digital media

and access to kind of online community support.

And that if we know that learning outside

of school matters a great deal to kids' ability to learn well

in school, we have to pay attention to that.

>>So it's a school that from the ground up has been designed

to leverage the kind of digital lives of kids, and it also looks

at the notion of how games work as learning systems,

and it's developed a pedagogical approach

that delivers what we call game-like learning.

And all that means is that kids are dropped

into complex challenge based context, that they have no ability to solve

at the beginning of ten weeks.

And then that ten week structure, what we call a mission,

is broken down into a series of smaller challenges, that scaffold

and really engage that kid in learning how to do something

that will allow them to solve that complex problem.

>>In watching these games,

you realize the reason why these games are so popular,

is they're so carefully balanced between offense and defense.

There's so many choices, there's so many challenges.

>>We're trying to prove that game design can help kids think deeper

and more abstractly about everything else.

And that we feel that the thing about game design is

that that's this generation's mode of discourse.

It's a fully mainstreamed art form, just like cinema is,

but a hundred years ago, you couldn't study cinema in a school.

Now every school has a cinematography class,

and game design has now reached a sort of mainstream acceptance.

It's how kids socialize, by playing games.

>>A lot of concerns that parents have when we start talking

about games is a concern around competition,

and a concern around notions of kind of incentives and rewards.

And what they get worried about is, "Oh, there's this game stuff

where kids get addicted and all they wanna do is get better,

better, better."

And so we've tried to strike a balance with that to say that, "Well,

what's really awesome about that is that kids are driven to get better."

And one thing games do do very, very well, is they understand how

to incentivize players to want to get better.

>>And then you have two goals, but one of them is impossible to get to.

>>Teacher: Okay.

>>My game has two goals that are both possible to get to.

>>So the way that our curriculum is structured in mission

and quest based, so it actually builds

on that trope from online gaming.

And the idea is that quests actually get harder as you move through them,

because you're actually developing tools and developing knowledge

and developing experiences.

And the goal is that you actually can't move to a quest

until you've completed one prior.

They're proceeding through some kind of challenge

and they're getting closer to some kind of end goal, and we have found

that that's very motivating for kids, that they know where they're at,

they know how far they've come and they know what they need to work on.

>>Game design is not just sitting in front of a computer

and creating a game where somebody runs

around collecting coins or something.

Game design is all about trial and error and figuring

out all these things that would make a good game.

>>Two of the big ideas that kids have been working on all year,

one is ideas of teamwork and collaboration,

which we think is a central skill in the twenty-first century.

Being able to not only work together with somebody,

but to have a specific expertise and being able to talk with someone

about that, share with someone about that,

and kind of co-build something together.

The second idea is around this idea of multi-modality, of kids being able

to read and encounter text and stories and image making in a lot

of different kinds of mediums.

>>This trimester in the Sports for the Mind class,

which is one of the central systems thinking classes,

where kids are making games as a way to learn about systems,

we decided to work on a kind of translation project.

So they're studying a story, studying Aesop's fables,

and they're looking at, what does it take the translate the components

of a story into a live, three D game environment?

And so we're moving from things like a static page, into an environment

where the kids have created

and costumed characters, they've built sets.

And then the final exhibition is, the kids will,

in this three D game, perform this story live.

So it's a little bit like a virtual theater performance of a story

that has come from a kind of oral tradition of storytelling,

moved to a printed page, moved to a kind of graphic novel format,

now into a three D game environment.

>>We think that design thinking is actually a way

of looking at the world.

It's a way of looking at the world as someone who is active in thinking

about how to solve problems, is active in kind of analyzing

and understand how things work, and we think that's a great stance

to have, to look at the world generally.

So we believe these kids are gonna grow up through work

in our school as design thinkers.

That doesn't mean that they're all gonna go

on to be designers in professional lives.

We would imagine and love that some of those kids will step into roles

as wanting to be scientists, wanting to be writers,

wanting to be musicians, you know, wanting to be whatever.

But they still will have this perspective on how they look

at the world, and that will inform any discipline that they go into.

>>Well, I think at the kind of heart of everything we're doing is,

we're trying to help kids understand how to be in charge

of their own learning, and continue to grow as learners

across their whole life, because we just understand that's critically

important these days.

These kids are not gonna graduate, enter a job and be in that job

for the rest of their lives.

They're gonna need to be able to adapt.

They're gonna have to learn new things constantly.

And so that's the type of learner that we're looking to graduate.