Boss Level II: What's Your Story?

For the past week the Institute of Play has been hard at work teaching and supporting the Quest to Learn "Boss Levels," the final form of assessment in the Quest to Learn school's trimester. The term boss level is derived from the video game world. It's used to describe the culminating stage (or level) in a video game when a player not only synthesizes and displays the skills they've built up throughout the game but also plumbs their knowledge bank to learn combine pre-existing ideas with new ones.

This Boss Level is the culmination of a trimester-long focus on the relationship between elements of a system and how change affects how systems interact. The unofficial tagline is "What Story Will you Tell?" and the student's are challenged to work in small groups to create, write, design, act and perform an original play. Although the goal of the project is to create and perform a play, the focus of the Boss Level is collaboration, process and working together.

During the first phase of the Boss Levels, students learn about the different elements of the theatrical system, such as scriptwriting, teamwork, performance, set production and sound and costume design. Working with customized scenarios in the embodied learning environment SMALLab, targeted research and a reading list, students learn about the different elements of theatrical storytelling such as plot, character, theme, conflict and resolution. From the school leader to the school technologist, it's all hands on deck as the Institute of Play and the Quest to Learn community helps students prepare and work together.