Five years ago, Ken Eklund turned online to tackle the issues raised by the future peak oil crisis with the alternate reality game World Without Oil. Now, Eklund has partnered up with Andi McDaniel and turned his attention on education with Ed Zed Omega, a game hoping to reimagine the educational system by following the stories of six fictional teens who choose to drop out of school.

By Brandie Minchew, originally posted at ARGNet

Theres this expression, zed omega. It means so over. When you go zed omega, you are done. -Ed Zed Omega Revealed

When it comes to public or private education, everyone has an experience, everyone has a story, and everyone has an opinion. The internet is rife with pointed discussions about the problems in education, and full of suggestions on how to solve them. While education issues vary broadly from state to state and nation to nation, they share at least one commonality: solutions tend to be easy to propose but difficult to implement. Education reform is an ongoing conversation amongst government officials, educators, and the public, and conversations between these groups are often politically charged and riddled with miscommunication and misunderstandings.

Andi McDaniel and Ken Eklund have brought something new to the conversation about education with their freshly-launched project, Ed Zed Omega. The project focuses on a set of voices that often gets lost in the cacophony that pervades the education discussion: the voices of those most directly affected by our education systems, the people currently subject to the state of being educated. Ed Zed Omega features the stories of six fictional teens who have decided that they are done with education, and that theyre not going back. Their guidance counselor, Mary Johnson, has convinced them to use the time they would have spent in school to complete one more assignment, exploring solutions to the problems they perceive in education.Ed Zed Omega launched on August 15, 2012 and will run through November 15, 2012 to follow their journey.

Several people and organizations are involved in the creation of Ed Zed Omega. The Association of Independents in Radio (AIR) put out a call to producers working on innovative storytelling through their Localoreinitiative. Ken Eklund and Andi McDaniel were matched up through Localore to create a proposal for one of ten projects to be featured by AIR/Localore. The project is funded through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPC) and presented by Twin Cities Public Television (TPT).

Eklund is no stranger to interactive narratives and serious games. In 2007, he created World Without Oil, the award-winning alternate reality game that jump-started a conversation about a near-future crisis where oil was in short supply. McDaniel is an interactive media producer for TPT, and her work in photography, print, radio and video span a wide range of topics and themes. When the pair first got together to start discussing their proposal, they didnt know that the focus would be education. However, TPT had historically done programming for kids and parents, as well as several documentaries on education. The subject of the high school dropout rate came up 1.2 million kids dropping out of school every year for myriad reasons and Eklund and McDaniel recognized the narrative power of teens who have disengaged with the education system. They envisioned the Zed Omegas, teens who feel let down by education and who want to try something different. They call it dropping out loud.

Ed Zed Omega focuses on the specific stories of six teens. Edwina, Nicole, Xavier, Lizabeth, Clare and Jeremy each have a different reason for wanting to drop out of high school and go their own way. They call themselves the Zed Omegas totally done with high school and reluctant to re-enter the education system as the summer draws to a close. Their guidance counselor, Mary Johnson, identified them as at risk teens and, rather than trying to convince them they are wrong to drop out, she is trying to re-engage them with a self-directed study on education. She is aided by homeschooled teen Nora Rose Melendy, along with Alan Greye and Zephyr Yilmaz who keep the Ed Zed Omega website up and running. August 15 is the day they dont return from their summer vacations, and when their exploration of education begins.

The Ed Zed Omega audience can interact with these teens and their support system through a wide variety of social media while following along with their progress in addressing the problems of education and as they deal with the consequences of dropping out of school. The audience is invited to influence and become part of the Ed Zed Omega story through sharing their thoughts, opinions, and experiences with the Zed Omegas. The games website makes it easy to follow the story using a Tumblr format with snapshots of character activity across the social media landscape.

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Reinventing Education for the Disaffected with Ed Zed Omega