“I feel so excited,” she said. “I really like this school, because, last year we weren’t interacting, and here I’m interacting and learning and not slouching in my seat.”
ChicagoQuest, one of 16 charters run by Chicago International Charter Schools, draws its entering class from 55 neighborhoods and 100 elementary schools, officials said. The 234 students are divided evenly between boys and girls, with an African-American majority, they said.
Director Michael Donhost said his main goal this academic year is to shape a cohesive culture for the school’s diverse population.
Quest will add a new grade annually through 2016, at which point the school will teach the sixth through 12th grades. The standard model of learning in school is flawed and outdated, Donhost said. “Information is compounding at 60 percent a year. Over 30 years, students will have a million times more information to manage. We want to create producers of information and not just consumers,” he said.
ChicagoQuest is the educational sibling of Quest to Learn, a similar digitally oriented school that opened in New York City in 2009. Both grew out of research funded by the MacArthur Foundation, which has dedicated $7 million of an $85 million investment in digital learning to get both schools up and running.
The two schools’ teaching model comes from game designer Katie Salen and her colleagues at the New York-based Institute for [sic “of”] Play. Besides her role at Quest to Learn, Salen is executive director at the institute, an organization that uses game design to develop materials used at both schools.
Salen recently joined DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media and helped oversee ChicagoQuest’s launch. While committed to the new learning vision, Salen dismisses technology as the “magic bullet.” “It’s not the technology. It’s the pedagogy” that counts.