Teaching with the ExoTerra Imagination Lab

We are still accepting requests to add ExoTerra to courses scheduled for Autumn, Winter, and Spring Quarters.

The ExoTerra Imagination Lab is an online community for undergraduate collaborative research, which can operate as a course plug-in for any undergraduate course, including STEM, Social Science, Humanities, and Arts courses. For courses which usually have lab components, ExoTerra research assignments can substitute for lab activities that cannot be adapted to pandemic restrictions. For other courses it can add a collaborative research element, letting students apply course content and conduct research in an online community designed to help counter the stressful isolation of social distancing.  ExoTerra can fit with courses in one of four ways, as:

1. a fully a para-curricular activity which interested students engage in on the side,
2. a curricular activity with rigorous graded group research assignments which become part of the syllabus,
3. an optional curricular track allowing students in a course to choose between completing standard assignments or doing the collaborative research, or
4. an extra credit option within a course; in all cases ExoTerra assignments can be combined with standard assignments.

Want to Propose a New Course?

The College is soliciting proposals for new Winter or Spring Quarter courses designed to integrate with ExoTerra.

Contact Ada Palmer

What Is ExoTerra?

ExoTerra is an educational role-playing game (RPG) like Model UN, but based in an online community, designed to be integrated into courses, and with a greater focus on research.  In ExoTerra students imagine themselves on a space colony ship traveling from Earth to a newly-terraformed exoplanet, where they must design their new world.  The students in each lab section form the committee tasked with planning a specific part of the new world, appropriate to each class.  Thus an economics course might be the committee in charge of designing the new world’s economic policies, an animal biology course its ocean biosphere, an architecture course its capital city, a philosophy course its educational curriculum, a chemical engineering course its fuel and power systems, or a pre-med course its plan to study the medical effects of differences between Earth and the new planet.  A course on postcolonial literature might develop a plan for the new society to address and memorialize the relationship between space colonization and Earth’s colonial histories, while an arts course might create maps, building designs, an anthem, or artworks for the new world.

What are the Para-Curricular Elements of ExoTerra?

ExoTerra has both para-curricular and optional curricular components. The para-curricular components occur exclusively outside of class time, and consist of students participating in an online community, where they role-play as space colonists and make plans for the new world.  In online discussions held via text, voice, and video, students in many courses will advise on key decisions, for example where on the new continent to build the capital city, a question which students in many fields (architecture, urban design, urban history, geography, sociology, transportation design) will find a chance to apply their knowledge. A series of decisions and plot developments, such as discoveries in the new solar system, will make different kinds of expertise (law, ethics, literature, gender) relevant in turn. These para-curricular components are ungraded and require no class time or instructor participation, but instructors may encourage students to participate and may request that their class be placed in charge of a particular aspect of the new world, which will create a class-specific discussion forum within the larger community portal, and a project for students in that class to take charge of. Many studies show that adding a game component like this to a course improves learning outcomes by giving students a fun arena to apply and use their knowledge, and helps students get to know each other, improving class discussion even in discussions where the game is not involved.  The ExoTerra program and its story will run for all three quarters of 2020/21, but each quarter will be a self-contained segment, with no ongoing obligations for instructors or students.

What are the Curricular Options?

Interested instructors may choose to integrate ExoTerra more directly into courses.  ExoTerra provides a sequence of suggested assignments (detailed below) of which faculty may include as few or as many as desirable, generally using them in the place of papers or research projects.

The standard assignments constitute the steps of students working as a team to produce a collaborative proposal describing the element of the new world they have been asked to design (capital city, penal system, etc.). In this model (other models are discussed below) students will participate in weekly ExoTerra discussion sections, conducted via Zoom and led by an ExoTerra course assistant (with optional instructor participation).  In those meetings, students will divide up the areas of background knowledge necessary to make the decision in question. Each student will then research one sub-topic, producing an individual paper reviewing our current knowledge of that sub-topic, with detailed citations, similar to the literature review section of a dissertation or grant application, but with the addition of a brief conclusion making one or more suggestions for how this knowledge should shape actions taken on the new planet.  Students in the course will then assemble those papers into a longer document, combining the suggestions yielded by each student’s research into a formal proposal, which will resemble a dissertation prospectus, grant application, or public works project proposal, i.e. rigorously laying out the relevant background knowledge and then proposing a future action.  Students will share these proposals with peers in the ExoTerra online community, receive and offer peer review, integrate that feedback, and submit a polished proposal as a group final project.  These are rigorous research assignments with no role-playing or fiction element beyond the exoplanet setting—the role-playing and fiction will remain para-curricular, conducted online outside of class.

To see how this would work, visit our Examples of Integrating ExoTerra Assignments into a Syllabus.

In courses without a research component, or with a more fixed syllabus such as some Core courses, ExoTerra can be integrated without the research component by having students debate the issues of the course in the context of the thought experiment setting of the new planet.  A course focused on political thought, for example, could read classic authors, and have students reflect on what recommendations those authors would make for the new civilization, culminating in drafting (individually or as a group) a document for the new world modeled on the readings, for example an outline of rights like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a draft constitution, or a statement of foundational principles for a new nation.

You can require all students in a course to do the ExoTerra assignments, or make it them an optional alternative track to traditional assignments. Making them optional can be a great way to subdivide large classes for discussion, having the ExoTerra course assistant lead one discussion for students doing ExoTerra, while the other students join the instructor or TA for a more standard discussion.

It is also possible to make ExoTerra participation available simply as an extra credit option, inviting interested students to do extra research applying their knowledge from the course to the exoplanet setting; ExoTerra staff will be available to help track, comment on, and suggest grades for such extra credit work, to make it easy for the instructor.

The key difference between ExoTerra assignments and more standard assignments is their dual collaborative nature—collaborative both within the class, and via the online community.  All students doing ExoTerra will get to see and respond to peers’ proposals, and students in separate courses can lend their expertise to each other (for example chemical engineering students advising the transportation committee on a solar roadway proposal, or the committee on the legacy of colonialism weighing in on what to include in the urban planning committee’s monument park). Undergraduates will use their research to develop their new world together, applying their knowledge, gaining a sense of team accomplishment, and getting to feel like experts as each brings unique knowledge to the team.

What Support Will Participating Instructors Receive?

A central ExoTerra team, led by Ada Palmer (History Department) will run the online community, oversee the advancing story, answer student questions about ExoTerra, and provide support to instructors throughout the quarter, including both instructors who integrate curricular components and those who simply encourage students to engage in para-curricular elements.

For those doing para-curricular elements only, the team will talk to you about setting up a custom forum for your students, and choosing what part of the world they are designing, but no more will be required from the instructor, unless you choose to engage in the online community yourself.

For those integrating graded ExoTerra assignments into a syllabus, including instructors who choose to integrate ExoTerra as an optional track or extra credit track, the team will work with each instructor before classes begin to create a class-specific plan focused on the skills and content you want students to cover, and to integrate exactly as many graded ExoTerra assignments as you wish to add to your syllabus, whether just a few, or the bulk of your graded assignments, as you prefer.  During the quarter, we will provide course assistants and/or ExoTerra team members to lead the weekly ExoTerra discussion sections and to support students with mentoring and virtual office hours.  For grading, depending on the needs of each course, we can provide either a course assistant to read students’ written ExoTerra work and provide written feedback and evaluations to help the instructor or department-provided TA grade more quickly, or, if needed, instructors can request an ExoTerra graduate TA to do grading directly.

Thus, each participating instructors may choose how much or how little you personally want to engage with ExoTerra.  At a minimum you would work with the team at the start to choose the topic and assignments, and have the CA or TA report to you and turn in recommended grades at the end.  Or you may do more: joining lab discussions, responding to drafts, even playing a character in the online community, however much or little you want to participate.

Can I Participate in Ways Other than Using ExoTerra in My Course?

Yes. Interested faculty are welcome to participate in a variety of ways, including watching how the game works via the online forums, playing a non-player-character, making suggestions and game documents, joining a committee, or many other options. See our Volunteering page or contact the main lab organizer Ada Palmer to discuss ideas.

Merits of ExoTerra During a Pandemic

The pandemic and related crises have created what many have recognized as a World Mental Health Epidemic. Chronic exposure to fear, anxiety, and social separation have traumatic effects on the nervous system, especially higher cognitive functions such as concentration and writing skills.  For college students, one of the most traumatic disruptions has been the dissolution of their social world.  College is many young people’s first experience of being the primary decision-makers in their lives, and of forming a community of friends which fills one’s whole experience, not just the school day.  This has been ripped apart, and students are starved for social interaction, and for the feeling of control.  First-year and transfer students especially will struggle to enter this disrupted social world, and to form friendships across distances (whether six feet or a thousand miles).

ExoTerra is designed to help.  Students in ExoTerra will be part of a small, intimate social group within their own labs, and a larger online community uniting multiple majors and years.  Gamification, especially Role-Playing Games (RPGs), are extremely effective at forming communities.  Classes which use RPGs, in addition to seeing high information retention and increased class participation, regularly see students learn each other’s names more, socialize outside of class more, and form strong, long-lasting friend groups at an even higher rate than intensive study abroad.  The game world will also give students a sense of power and self-determination, as students shape a new world, and debate and vote on major decisions (such as the system of government, or the location of the capital city), an inclusive and non-threatening way to explore democracy and governance.  The excitement of ongoing science fiction plot twists will provide a therapeutic break from the daily crises of 2020, while the parallels to real-world issues (constitution-writing, climate, colonialism), will give friend groups tools to discuss the crises of our time within the fun, lower-stress game world.  The story will continue over the three quarters of 2020/21, and students whose ExoTerra courses have ended will remain part of the online community, retaining and continuing relationships.  Friendship, community, feelings of empowerment and control, tools for ethical and political discussion—these help counter the traumatic neurological effects of the crisis, aiding students’ ability to concentrate, write, and learn.

Is This Like those O-Week ARG Events, Parasyte and Terrarium?

ExoTerra is Role-Playing Game (RPG), which similar to an Augmented Reality Game (ARG), but not identical.  In an ARG, participants play as themselves, i.e. as a student at U Chicago, same name, same home, same year, but with game elements layered on top of their lived reality (a secret society, a magic machine).  In an RPG, participants create a characters who are not their everyday selves, with a different name, background, and goals, and often living in an imagined other world (in our case a space fleet).  Both ARGs and RPGs are powerful educational tools, but ARGs tend to make extensive use of the real physical environment (campus), while an RPG can step further from our present (and its troubles), using spaces which are equally accessible from anywhere, ideal for geographic separation.

Can I Propose a New Course for ExoTerra?

The College is welcoming proposals for new courses in any field which want to use ExoTerra during the three quarters of the 2020/21 school year.  Faculty, grad students, and postdocs are all welcome to propose courses.  Please reach out to Ada Palmer if interested.