New York City's Quest to Learn, the nation's first public school based on principles of game design, is testing the notion that allowing young people to construct their own learning environments is the best way to help them achieve academically and acquire the skills necessary for the 21st century.

On a typical school day, the 79 students in Quest to Learn's first class could be building their own digital game or working with teachers to go on "quests" that require them to think about design, systems, and applied knowledge, as well as traditional subjects like math and science.

Children have always learned through play, researchers say, and today, digital media have resulted in increasingly more sophisticated games that can engage youth while at the same time encouraging learning.

"Game designers really understand the problem of engagement and its close connection to feedback, rewards, motivation, and goal setting. These are specific aspects of the design of 21st-century learning environments that can be shared and advanced through work with teachers," said Katie Salen, the lead designer of Quest to Learn and director of the nonprofit Institute of Play, of which the school is a part.

Quest to Learn opened in fall 2009 with support from the MacArthur Foundation and in partnership with New Visions for Public Schools, The New School, and the Pearson Foundation. If successful, Quest to Learn could become a compelling model of school innovation and provide evidence about how to design and implement curricula that lead to high levels of youth engagement and achievement in traditional reading, writing, and mathematics. In addition, the school will help young people acquire 21st-century skills and competencies, such as teamwork, creative problem solving, systems thinking, and time management. Quest to Learn will add one grade each year, eventually expanding enrollment from the 6th to the 12th grade by 2015.

The curriculum is centered on game- like learning, delivered through a series of missions and quests, said Salen. And digital and nondigital games are integrated into the learning activities throughout the curriculum as keys to solving a quest, she said.

Standard classes such as English language arts and math are replaced with four integrated "domains," which focus on applied knowledge and conceptual thinking. One domain, called The Way Things Work, is an integrated math and science class organized around ideas from design and engineering. Students focus on taking systems apart and putting them back together. Another domain, Codeworlds, is an integrated English language arts, math, and computer programming class organized around the idea of symbolic systems, language, syntax, and grammar. Learning activities include solving the case of a missing professor through cracking codes left in books in his secret library.

To achieve its goals, the school taps into its students' interest-driven communities, mirroring UC Irvine professor Mimi Ito's research on how youth engage with digital media. The study also found that young people's learning is both networked and peer-based. In response, teachers at Quest to Learn function less as knowledge gatekeepers and more as "learning experts, mentors, motivators, technology integrators, and diagnosticians," said Salen.

"In an age when half of urban kids drop out of school, research consistently shows high levels of engagement exhibited by youth in various media platforms; it is incumbent on educators to take notice and indeed redirect teaching methods to meet the needs and interests of students. Quest to Learn has been designed to meet this need and the needs of the many students not well served by more traditional school models," said Salen.

While much has been written about young people's use of games, until Quest to Learn little had been done to establish an overall "pedagogy" of gaming, game design, and play that considers how all the various elements from code to social practices and aesthetics can be brought together in the design of a school.

"Game designers share much in common with good teachers," Salen said. "Content is scaffolded and delivered 'just in time'; content and skills are situated within specific contexts that give rise to particular meanings and understandings; assessment is embedded, deep attention is paid to providing challenging problems that can be solved, but none in obvious ways."

Education and human development scholars have long argued that play is a form of learning. It provides a world in which rules guide behavior and actions, similar to the real world. And in education, engagement is also correlated with academic achievement, said Valerie Shute, a professor at Florida State University who is among a group of scholars participating in a MacArthur-funded initiative to assess game-based learning.

"There is evidence that games can enhance learning, but we need data," said Shute, adding that Quest to Learn provides researchers with controlled evaluations about "what works for whom and under what circumstances."

Salen prefers to call the school a "learning community," in line with its goal of building a bridge between the school and the after-school activities of its students and creating lifelong learners. Students at Quest to Learn can interact with members of the school's Mission Lab, a curriculum development lab that connects and synthesizes information from other formal and informal learning environments — from nonprofits to schools to industry.

"The design of Quest to Learn has purposely responded not only to the growing evidence that digital media and games offer powerful models for reconsidering how and where young people learn," said Salen, "but that access for all students to these opportunities is critical. We believe that supporting students, their parents, and communities in a quest to become motivated, resourceful, lifelong learners is a true aim of education."