Abstract

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.

Keywords: Interactive simulations; Authoring environments; User interfaces; New applications