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Games have long played a role in classrooms, but next month marks the launch of the first U.S. public school curriculum based entirely on game-inspired learning. Select sixth graders can look forward to playing video games such as "Little Big Planet" and "Civilization," as well as non-digital games ranging from role-playing scenarios to board games and card games.

But this goes beyond guiding your virtual settlers in "Oregon Trail" during classroom free time. The Quest to Learn (Q2L) school, based in Manhattan, hopes its guided approach can help students take on the role of explorers, mathematicians, historians, writers and evolutionary biologists.

University grads everywhere may feel pressure to succeed, but the stakes ramp up when your school's co-founders include AI visionary Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation. Now recent grads of Singularity U have announced their strategies for using emerging technologies to help one billion people over the next 10 years.

We have all at one point or another learned some variation of a mathematical formula involving trains and their timetables. For example: if a train leaves Boston for New York at 7am and travels at 60mph, will it beat a train leaving Providence at 6am traveling 45mph? The idea behind this kind of "story" problem is to engage a student with a real-world example to which they can relate. The thinking follows that that engagement will solidify the mathematical concept. It's one of those conceits that has hung around for seemingly as long as math has been taught. And it may very well be completely wrong.

We first became acquainted with Mrs. Daftari's fifth-grade class earlier this year when they rose to a challenge printed in PopSci by submitting their essays for how they'd change the world. Most recently, they sent us these video responses to our 5-Minutes Projects series. In the second, McKenna Mooney and Madison Wilson replicate Megan Miller's DIY non-Newtonian fluid (otherwise known as slime). And in the first, Kacie Moore and Olivia Johnson present a project of their own: the sound catcher.