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WolfQuest: Taking Video Games into the Realm of ISE

View a video interview with Grant Spickelmeier about Wolfquest

WolfQuest, designed by the Minnesota Zoo and eduweb, promotes gameplay and intense social interactions among youth (ages 10–18) who are not normally attentive to ecological concepts and conservation issues. The game, developed with funding from NSF (DRL-0610427), seeks to illuminate ecological principles, such as predator-prey relationships, as well as develop learners’ problem-solving skills.

Unlike most projects in the nascent "serious games" field, WolfQuest is designed to compete against commercial games for the attention of young people at home during their leisure time. Since the launch of WolfQuest in December 2007, over 160,000 people around the world have downloaded the science game. Among WolfQuest's youth learners in the United States, 25% percent are minorities. Six percent are Native American youth—six times their representation in the U.S. population. While most visitors to ISE facilities live in suburban areas, WolfQuest youth more closely mirror the national population: 28% live in urban areas, 48% are suburban, and 23% are rural. In contrast to most commercial interactive games which appeal primarily to males, nearly half of WolfQuest's youth learners are female.

WolfQuest represents a wave of transformative innovations in 21st century teaching and learning. It is reaching and engaging impressive numbers of people in the United States, as well as across vast geographic distances and cultures. It fosters learning through individual gameplay as well as through social interaction in its multiplayer social community and online discussion forum. In addition, WolfQuest removes formal barriers typically found between scientists and the public: Youth can talk directly with the world's leading wolf researchers. Over time, WolfQuest will aggregate data on learners' science content acquisition, attitudinal change, and game engagement. This data should yield new guidelines on effective practices for the future development of science education games and appropriate methodologies for evaluating game-based learning.

The latest version of WolfQuest—now featuring grizzly bears—can be downloaded at wolfquest.org. View learner-posted gameplay on YouTube.