Readin', writin' and raidin': the World of Warcraft learning experience

By David M Williams
Tuesday, 23 June 2009 05:12

Technology

You are a level 10 character. You have a quest to kill 10 mottled boars which yield 120 experience each. The quest reward is 1000xp. How many extra boars do you need to kill to level up? Yes folks, World of Warcraft is the new educational medium.

While working on developing a curriculum for “at-risk” students in middle and high schools in the United States, Lucas Gillespie hit on the idea that the popular global massive multiplayer online role playing game (or MMORPG) World of Warcraft (WoW) could actually help achieve his goals.

Gillespie founded an after-school “club” for these students with WoW being the focal point for exploring writing, literacy, mathematics, digital citizenship and online safety.

Gillespie’s work can be found online at his wiki WoWInSchools. Others can contribute and while sceptics may scoff, there is actually some very impressive educational content.

Helga Brown, a North Carolina educator, contributed a full lesson plan aligned with the school English II curriculum, that requires students to construct a quest chain which must have four steps and two different areas, at a minimum. Students are expected to construct all the dialogue for non-player characters (NPCs) themselves.

Meanwhile, mathematics problems help young students level up their own algebra skills while considering the in-game problem of reputation grinding. “You are interested in purchasing a Sporeggar pet that requires you to achieve Exalted status with the Sporeggar clan,” the text reads.

“You currently have 11,000 out of 21,000 revered status. How much more reputation do you need to reach exalted? There are two ways to gain Sporeggar reputation at this point: Farming Sanguine Hibiscus from Underbog which yields 750 reputation per 5 flowers and doing the daily Sporeggar quest, ‘Now that we are still friends’ for 750 reputation. Assume you can farm 25 Hibiscus flowers per Underbog run and that the run takes one hour. Devise a plan for finishing out your reputation.”

Meanwhile, another question asks how your abilities will be affected if changing from a 100 damage per second (dps) weapon that takes 1.5 seconds to use to a 125 dps weapon at 1.7 seconds.

Gillespie says often students are at risk not because they lack the capacity to learn but because school holds no perceived relevance to them or it bores them. They don’t read literature because they cannot relate to it, and they don’t write because they feel they have nothing to share.

Gillespie recognised that WoW was a shared experience among young students in his area and it occurred to him it was a tremendous catalyst to inspire these young adults to learn such things as reading, writing and mathematics.

It’s certainly proving to help the students level up real-world skills while focusing on a game they love.