Big Questions, Real Work: This Year's 1st Quests at Forest
A Quest is a multi-week challenge where heroes step into a real occupation, solve a meaningful problem, and create work for a real audience. Exhibition is the culminating event where heroes present, demonstrate, or defend what they have created. Together, Quest and Exhibition turn learning into purposeful work with visible results. Read below for each Studio’s Quest and Exhibition details. Reach out to our Dean of Parents with any questions.
Spark: Step Into Spark, A parent journey and discovery night
What does independence actually look like in Spark?
The first Quest in Spark is learning the Spark way. Heroes will practice choosing their work, caring for their space, solving small problems, reflecting on their choices, and contributing to their community. During Family Share Time, they will practice being thoughtful hosts as they welcome their families into the Studio and share something meaningful from their family story.
Exhibition will be a parents-only experience designed to help parents and caregivers understand the Spark way, too. Parents will take part in Studio-style activities and experience how choice, routines, reflection, and clear expectations build independence. They will also talk with the Forest and parent team about the systems that help young heroes grow in confidence, responsibility, communication, and care for their community.
Lower Elementary: Wave Benders: The Studio Design Challenge
How can light and sound make a Studio calmer, clearer, and easier to learn in? Lower Elementary heroes will practice the work of physicists as they investigate how waves move, reflect, bend, vibrate, and create shadows or echoes. They will observe their learning space, collect data, test prototypes, and design recommendations that could make the Studio brighter, quieter, more creative, or better able to support flow. Along the way, heroes will build skills in experimentation, measurement, teamwork, design, and evidence-based decision-making.
Just as heroes will study how light and sound shape the physical Studio, they will explore how promises and routines shape its culture. At Exhibition, Squads will lead games that introduce families to their Contract of Promises and Studio systems. Through play, families will see how these systems help heroes practice responsibility, leadership, communication, repair, and independence.
Upper Elementary: Operation Fireproof Fayetteville
Fire Chief Linda Black and the Fayetteville Fire Department face a new challenge: protecting QTS Data Center and Trilith Live, two of the largest spaces they have ever served. Upper Elementary heroes will practice the work of fire inspectors as they study how fires start, spread, and can be safely stopped. They will meet firefighters, examine real safety needs, and explore combustion, heat transfer, evacuation routes, and risk.
Heroes will create Emergency Response Pre-Plans for the fire department and home fire safety plans for their own families. They will build skills in research, mapping, teamwork, risk assessment, and professional communication. At Exhibition, they will present their plans and explain how their ideas could help protect people in these major community spaces.
Middle School: Future Me Financial Quest
Adult life brings big choices, limited money, and unexpected changes. Middle School heroes will practice the work of personal financial advisors as they create individual plans based on careers, locations, housing, transportation, and lifestyle priorities. Working in teams of three or four, they will research real costs, interview older students and recent graduates, and compare how different choices shape their financial futures.
Teams will complete financial stress tests and recommend adjustments when surprise expenses or life changes disrupt their plans. They will use budgeting, data analysis, collaboration, and decision-making to build a shared Financial Resilience Review. At Exhibition, each team will receive a final financial wrench and present immediate recommendations to families while defending their trade-offs. The next day, heroes will use family feedback to complete their final review.
High School : There’s an App for That
What if heroes could listen to someone’s problem and build an app that helps solve it? High School heroes will practice the work of software developers as they find a real user and investigate a frustrating, costly, or time-consuming challenge. They will conduct interviews, observe the problem, and gather evidence. Design thinking will guide the process as they define the need, generate ideas, build a prototype, test it, and revise their solution.
Heroes will integrate research, writing and communication, mathematics, technology and computer science, and art and design as they interview a real user, analyze evidence, define a problem, and develop a solution. Using Design Thinking and AI, they will build, test, defend, and improve an app prototype that measurably addresses an authentic community need. Along the way, they will build skills in interviewing, research, technical problem-solving, collaboration, and client communication. At Exhibition, heroes will introduce their users, demonstrate their apps live, explain their design decisions, and defend how their solutions could make a meaningful difference.