Sasha A. Barab

Grounded in work on game‑based curricula, the paper articulates transformational play and describes a curriculum designed by that theory. In a study of a teacher delivering two units (game‑based vs. story‑based) on persuasive writing, both classes showed significant learning gains, with significantly greater gains, engagement, different motivational goals, and fewer off‑task reprimands in the game‑based condition. Implications for school implementation and learning theory are discussed.

Videogames are a powerful medium for creating narratively rich worlds to achieve educational goals. The authors advance the theory of transformational play, in which learners take on the role of a protagonist who must employ conceptual understandings to transform a problem-based fictional context—while transforming themselves. The article surveys the theory and grounds it in two curriculum units developed through design‑based research, concluding with research and design challenges.

Argues that videogames, as narratively rich media, can sustain engagement in curricular dramas where players’ knowledgeable actions shape unfolding fictions. Games allow players to inhabit roles of author, performer, and audience, enabling narrative transactivity. Grounded in two design projects and their implementations, the article discusses implications for leveraging immersive, interactive media to accomplish wide‑ranging educational ends.

Presents a 3D game‑based curriculum on water quality and compares four instructional conditions varying in contextualization: expository text, descriptive framing, immersive world (dyad), and immersive world (single user). The immersive conditions outperformed the expository text on standardized items; the dyad also performed better on a transfer task. Findings support immersive game‑based environments as effective curricula for science learning.

Addresses benefits of engaging learners in socioscientific inquiry (SSI) by reviewing literature showing gains in content knowledge and understanding the nature of science, and by introducing socioscientific reasoning as a suite of practices for negotiating SSI. Interviews with 24 middle‑school students informed an emergent rubric for socioscientific reasoning and highlighted variation in students’ practices and implications for assessment.

Reports research embedding 4th‑grade students in Quest Atlantis’ aquatic habitat simulation. A socio‑scientific narrative and interactive rule set in a MUVE positioned learners to investigate water‑quality concepts and balance scientific with socio‑economic factors. Students were engaged, produced quality work, and learned targeted science content, suggesting multi‑user virtual worlds can be effectively leveraged for academic learning.

Advances an ecological theory of knowing that prioritizes engaged participation over knowledge acquisition. The environment is characterized as affordance networks extended in time and activated through individuals’ intentions and effectivity sets. To clarify the challenge of connecting learners to ecological systems through which affordance networks are realized, the article introduces the concept of life‑worlds and offers an ecological focal point for curricular design.

Describes the Quest Atlantis (QA) project, a multiuser virtual environment that immerses children ages 9–12 in educational tasks. QA combines strategies from commercial gaming with research‑based lessons on learning and motivation, allowing learners to perform quests, interact with others and mentors, and build virtual personae. The socially‑responsive design aims to build sociotechnical structures that engage and potentially transform individuals and their participation contexts, suggesting an expansive role for instructional designers.

Introduces critical design ethnography, an ethnographic process that couples participatory design with local transformation while producing a reusable instructional design. Reflecting on the Quest Atlantis project, the authors discuss opportunities and tensions encountered as they built local critiques and reified them into designed artifacts subsequently implemented worldwide.

Highlights and problematizes challenges in carrying out design‑based research (DBR). Situated within the interdisciplinary learning sciences, the paper contrasts DBR with laboratory experimentation and characterizes DBR in terms of designed artifacts and resultant theory. It argues that learning, cognition, knowing, and context are co‑constituted, and that DBR serves as a bridge between theory and practice to generate robust, actionable knowledge about learning.

Analyzes the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), a sociotechnical interaction network supporting a Web‑based community of teachers. Applying activity theory to ILF’s design, the authors discuss tensions that emerge when attempting to design a community that expects new practices from members and argue that activity theory and sociotechnical interaction network perspectives together provide a richer lens on design and community functioning.