WebQuest: Substantiating Education in Edutainment Through Interactive Learning Games

In educational contexts the WWW can be viewed as source of edutainment that is quite effective on the entertainment side because most students are highly motivated to use the web but is much less successful on the educational side. Without a structuring mechanism that allows focus on specific learning domains, the usefulness of the web may be similar to having 500 channels of TV. Learning in these kinds of contexts is not impossible but relies too much on the ability to follow a glut of hyperlinks, and passive information absorption. The effectiveness of the web as a learning tool can be significantly increased by combining it with more constructive tools. These tools should not only allow students to create representations that are interesting to themselves but are also interesting enough to share with other students. This paper presents WebQuest, a system combining the WWW with the notion of an interactive quest game. Instead of just creating their own homepages, that may be interesting to other students for only social reasons, students turn into authors of their own interactive quest games. They set up complex worlds containing interesting landscapes and tricky obstacles linked to real websites. Players of the game answer questions to acquire important objects needed to solve the quest. This approach provides several learning opportunities to author and players of the games. Authors learn by doing. They create the worlds, come up with challenging yet solvable questions, and provide relevant links to clues on the web. The players, in turn, learn from solving the quest. They can use the links provided by the authors as clues but can also follow their own intuition and use the entire web as a resource to solve the quest. Author and players can start a dialog facilitating reflective learning, for instance, helping authors to understand what makes good or bad questions, how much information should be given in a clue, and how to find new topic-related websites. The system is described, roles of teachers and students are outlined, and we report on our initial classroom uses and ongoing development of WebQuest. Education versus Entertainment As acceptance of the World Wide Web grows in the K12 (ages 5 18) community as a valid research tool, concerns rise about how educators can best take advantage of the vast growing number of resources to be 2/20/98 12:58 PM WebQuest Page 1 of 13 http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~corrina/WebQuest/ found there. Educators are faced with an exponentially expanding amount of information, but have qualms and questions about how to bring kids on-line, how to introduce them to the web and how to use this resource in an educational setting. Teachers are often not fluent in the technology themselves, and additionally, have no time to develop their own plans for incorporating the use of on-line resources into their own curricula. At the Center for LifeLong Learning and Design, our use of technology in education has focused on blending constructionist systems, in the form of interactive simulations, with the support of network media, such as the World Wide Web [1,9]. Constructionism, based on the constructivist ideas of Piaget that stress that knowledge is constructed from a child's experiences in the world, proposes that people best construct new knowledge when they are engaged in personally-meaningful tasks[8] . In contrast, a more traditional, instructionist approach in the classroom treats a student as an empty vessel to be filled with facts. Ideally, these approaches should be combined, for on their own, they each lack a crucial element of the learning process. Instructionist methods often neglect the hands-on practical experience that constructionist methods stress, and constructionist methods stress de-contextualized doing with little or no intervention or presentation of fundamental material. Simply turning students loose on World Wide Web browsers combines the worst of both of these approaches. Students are exposed to a huge information space of instructionist material with no focus. In this way, the technology becomes a step back, rather than a step forward. Current Internet browsers were designed for the cross-platform distribution of multimedia information, and this useful feature is often an impediment to comprehensive, interactive, participatory applications for education. The majority of sites on the web have been developed for commercial or entertainment reasons, and allowing students to websurf in class may entertain them, but learning is questionable. The challenge for technology in the classroom is to provide a high level of engagement and to support the learning process as well [5] . This paper presents a system called WebQuest, describes the roles of teachers and students using WebQuest, presents our experiences in classes of various K12 grades, and outlines our plans for future development. Educational and Internet Games and the Value of the Design Process Internet Scavenger hunts have been successful in teaching net searching strategies and skills. Early hunts such as Rick Gates' The Internet Hunt[3] , relied on the user needing to know how to search sites available only through telnet connections and later-as gopher developed-much of the information was transferred there. Even with the difficulty of pulling information from a pre-web Internet, individuals and students around the world spent hours puzzling over and seeking answers. The Web and the powerful search engines that have been developed make pulling information off the Internet a much simpler task. Educational games are usually more successful in an entertainment or game context than an educational one. A few, such as SimCity®, Carmen San Diego®, and various Multi-User Dungeons/dimensions (MUDs/MOOs) have been used effectively for education [2,3,14] . We have combined an Internet Scavenger hunt, or quest, with an interactive simulation game to create a software package called WebQuest. WebQuest is an educational game for K12 classrooms, designed to help students gain internet research skills while researching answers to questions relevant to current classroom curricula. WebQuest attempts to go beyond games like Carmen San Diego® by allowing players to author games as well as play them. This means that not only can students take on the role of player in the game, but that they can change roles from player to author, designing and constructing quests (consisting of a questworld, and questpages, which will be explained below) for themselves and other players. Additionally, quests are linked to real WWW sites, and not only pages provided by the game's authors. MUDs/MOOs-where MOOs are object-oriented versions of MUDs-allow the notion of authors and players. However, sometimes these roles are distinct, in that a player must acquire a certain level of proficiency before s/he can progress from player to author. Currently, MUDs and MOOs are text-based. Therefore, they may be accessible to the web, but all interaction within them is done within the bounds of the game, and textually. WebQuest allows the entire WWW to be used as a resource within the game, and includes 2/20/98 12:58 PM WebQuest Page 2 of 13 http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~corrina/WebQuest/ multimodal authorship. Quest authors build rich visual quests that incorporate sound as well as text, graphics, and even programmed behaviors. SimCity® includes complex construction and simulation components, beautiful visual feedback, and sound. The focus in the game is learning by doing--players are authors. Authors can even change the visual appearance of the game objects. They are limited, however, by simulation behavior. If, for example, one wishes to add bikepaths to SimCity, which are not included, it cannot be done. The simulation acts as its creators intended, and may not be affected by players of the game. Although students learn valuable concepts of complex, hidden causal relationships, they must adapt information from outside the game to the game itself, and can not change the game based on their learning of related material. In WebQuest, authors can build questworlds that differ radically from those provided, in both appearance and behavior, and are encouraged to incorporate research resources on the WWW into their quests as they construct knowledge. Participation in a design process provides rich opportunities for learning [4,16] Learning happens by active participation in the formulation and construction of personally meaningful artifacts [7] In this case, artifacts are quests created by WebQuest teachers or students who wish to be authors. Designing a quest gives authors ownership and control of a questworld, and allows them to integrate knowledge about a quest's theme with knowledge acquired from the WWW and knowledge about game construction. The presence of an audience has an effect on the learning process. The artifact is framed, executed, reflected upon, and perhaps revised with the audience in mind. By combining an interactive simulation game and the WWW, we enable learning by acquisition, but also by design, construction, and reflection. Learning by players and authors in WebQuest is summarized in Figure 1. Role Action Learning Motivation Player navigate collect objects solve quests feedback to quest authors WWW research skills theme knowledge engaged in game interest in theme material Author -authoring questworlds create questpages construct the quest gameboard, new game objects and their behaviors incorporate feedback from players design skills programming skills navigation skills reflection audience: to share new quests with others. to build new things that contribute to, or extend the game to surpass previous quests Figure 1: Learning from an Interactive Simulation Game + WWW WebQuest: Interactive Simulation Game + WWW WebQuest combines the WWW with a SimCity(tm)-like interactive simulation game. Webquest is implemented in Agentsheets [10-13] , a programming substrate developed here at the University of Colorado that facilitates the creation of visual environments. In the past four years, Agentsheets has been used to create more than 60 educational and industrial applications such as construction kits, interactive simulation environments, visual programming languages, design environments and games. Similar to spreadsheets and cellular automata [17] , Agentsheets uses a visual formalism [6] based on a grid structure. Agents are autonomous computational units arranged in the grid structure, which is called an agentsheet. The look and behavior of individual agents are defined by users, which was why it was selected for WebQuest. Each agent has sensors and effectors that allow it to communicate with the user or other agents. Sensors include mouse, keyboard and microphone input. Effectors can be used to animate agents, send messages to other agents, to play sounds or even to speak via voice synthesizers. WebQuest features a number of predefined agents including knights, musketeers, paths, and trees (Figure 2). For WebQuest, Agentsheets was extended to use AppleEvents to control the Netscape Navigator WWW browser. This capability was added to the behavior of various game objects, such as scrolls, so that the connection between the game environment in Agentsheets and the WWW environment of Netscape Navigator would be as seamless as 2/20/98 12:58 PM WebQuest Page 3 of 13 http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~corrina/WebQuest/ possible to the students and teachers using the game, and still not diminish functionality from either of the systems. For more information about Agentsheets, see: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~l3d/systems/agentsheets/. WebQuest was created to be a constructionist learning environment. There are two kind of users. Authors are users creating worlds such as in figure 2. A world represents a quest containing little puzzles that need to be solved by the players of the game. The player sees both the game environment (Agentsheets), and the WWW browser (Netscape Navigator) on the screen at the same time. They choose their game identity from a palette of Renaissance characters (figure 3), and place it onto the gameboard. The gameboard is the visual representation of the questworld, and contains a maze of roads winding through trees and over and around rivers and lakes. It is filled with dragons, greedy ferryboat men, and other objects, such as rocks, trees, doors, jewels, ships, purses of money, and keys. Each of the gameboard components has associated behaviors and attributes that the player discovers as the game proceeds. Attributes of game objects can be connections to questpages, which are WWW pages that contain questions that must be answered to obtain an object for later use. In figure 2, the student's character is the knight navigating the path around the lake. Minimal information is provided at the outset, and clues about how to play are obtained by trial. The player wanders around the gameboard by using the cursor keys, exploring objects and actions which give hints about what is required to progress to the next level. A player soon learns that keys open the doors that separate a dragon from the playing field, and that keys are obtained by answering the questions posed by scrolls. Players can accumulate wealth, sail ships to other worlds, find jewels and other objects-each earned by research contributing to the knowledge about the theme of the quest. 2/20/98 12:58 PM WebQuest Page 4 of 13 http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~corrina/WebQuest/ Figure 2: The Web World and a portion of a WebQuest Gameboard Authoring Learning Quests In this section, we outline a scenario for classroom use of WebQuest. Students will use the game environment of WebQuest, which consists of the Renaissance characters and objects mentioned above, to build an instructional quest game about the theme of the Solar System. In their game, players will go on quests searching for space-related information on the web to obtain the game objects and solve the quests. Max, the teacher of a middle school science class is about to teach a module on the Solar System. Traditionally, he would simply hand out information, assign reading, and write or draw additional material on the blackboard. After giving his lectures and discussing the reading in the science book, he would give his students a test covering the material, and then the class would proceed to the next subject-plants and photosynthesis. He knows the Solar System is a unit that can be particularly interesting to students, and that photographs from the Hubble Telescope and the Galileo space probe have not yet made it into textbooks but are available on the WWW. He decides to incorporate these new photographs, and other sites with planetary information by using WebQuest to teach the Solar System module. This way, the students can use the WWW to find these various sites and share them with the class. Max splits up the class into teams of 4. Each team is given a specific subtopic, related to the Solar System for which they will have to create a learning quest. One team works on planets and motion. 2/20/98 12:58 PM WebQuest Page 5 of 13 http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~corrina/WebQuest/ Figure 3: The WebQuest Palette of Game Characters and Objects (1.) Researching the Theme Building a quest begins with the theme "planets and motion". Members of the authoring team search the web to find relevant sites, determine the goals of the quest, and develop appropriate questions for the quest players. They can then create questpages , which are web pages that pose questions and provide hints, and a questworld, which consists of the gameboard that the player's character navigates around, and game objects, which the player interacts with. Using Internet search engines available, such as Yahoo and others, the authors quickly find two URLs of interest. The first site is called "Views of the Solar System", and the second is called "Solar System Live". Browsing these two sites, they discover that one has a great deal of information on the planets in the solar system, their moons and characteristics, and the other contains an interactive display that, when given a date and time, will illustrate the position in orbit of all the planets in the solar system. Using these pages and the information they contain, they formulate a list of topic-related questions that other members of the class will need to answer to solve PlanetQuest. Students type this information into the Agentsheets environment, and an HTML file (questpage) is automatically created for them by the system in their game folder. (2.) Designing and Laying Out the Gameboard A questworld has several components. First, there is the gameboard, which an author creates by using objects from the palette and laying them out onto a blank gameboard. Next, there is the palette itself. The palette consists of game objects and their behaviors. Working together, the authoring team designs their gameboard using the existing palette objects. First, they lay out a background of forest, then weave a winding path through the forest. One of the students wishes to add a river, and another wishes to add a lake or an ocean, so that ships may be sailed on the quest. The authors decide where the quest will end, and talk about various barriers to test the players. By selecting game objects from the palette and drawing them onto the gameboard, they conceptualize the various routes a player may take through the quest. (3.) Connecting the Questworld with Questpages The students place a dragon at the end of the quest. Dragons are game objects that breathe fire, roar and ask a question that must be answered correctly for the dragon to be slayed and disappear, allowing the player to 2/20/98 12:58 PM WebQuest Page 6 of 13 http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~corrina/WebQuest/ go past. One author points out that if the player can just go to the dragon and answer one question, the game will be over very quickly, and the group decides that more barriers must be placed along the path so that a player will find the desired websites and learn about planets and their motion. Soon, the dragon is surrounded by locked doors. Doors are objects in the palette that can only be opened by keys. Keys are hidden under scroll objects, which point to questpages. By answering the question on the scroll's questpage, the player earns a key which can open a door to give access to the dragon. The authors place several keys, covered by scrolls, on the gameboard, and, by using the game's authoring interface, hook the scrolls to the questpages they have prepared. The answers to the questions they have placed on the questpages are programmed into the keys through the author's interface, so that when a player tries to grab a key, they must type in the correct answer to the scroll's question to successfully obtain it. After much discussion, the group decides to make the dragon's question something that must be discovered by navigating several links into the "Views of the Solar System" website. Going back and forth between the gameboard they are developing and that website, they formulate what they believe is a suitably hard question and finally, the dragon is programmed with this question, and its answer. When the teacher announces that the class time is over, this group is busy adding a ship and guardian ferryman to finalize the gameboard. They save their work, and eagerly look forward to the next week, when they will trade quests with another team, who is working on a quest about stars and galaxies. (4.) Changing & Extending the Questworld This team was using WebQuest for the first time, and therefore did not yet know that they could add game objects, or change the look of existing objects through the palette. An author has access to the behavior of the game objects, and in adding a new game object, can "borrow" behavior from existing objects. The author's interface to the interactive simulation game offers various ways to build new ideas into a quest. These range from the relatively simple task of drawing a new playing character, to the more difficult task of programming a new game object's behavior. Current work seeks to make these programming tasks simpler, more visual, and more instructive. Figure 7 depicts a gameboard authored by a student of the Science Discovery Program.