Abstract

Quest Atlantis (QA) is an educational virtual world environment that provides a rich capability for students to undertake quests to solve challenging and interesting real-world problems. QA provides a toolkit for teachers to manage the experiences of their students. We describe our efforts to develop, deploy, and maintain in-class, after school, and summer camp programs based on Quest Atlantis. We introduce the methods we used to train teachers to use QA and discuss some of the issues we encountered when starting out and the solutions we developed. We describe how students have used QA to learn while also performing socially aware activities, and discuss some of our impressions on how students who normally do not perform well in class respond well to learning within Quest Atlantis. Virtual worlds for learning offer many benefits for augmenting our school education programs, and we summarize some of our recommendations for how to make use of this valuable technology.