World of Warcraft Ventures Into the Classroom

Two schools began using World of Warcraft in an after school club as a way to reach out to disaffected students. The program has morphed into an elective language arts class. Students from Cape Fear Middle School in Rocky Point, North Carolina and Suffern Middle School in New York have formed their own guild and even maintain their own wiki page. The project has grown to include more schools and the wiki offers tips for teachers looking to implement the course.

Former Biology teacher and Program Creator Lucas Gillespie says the program’s goals are to reach disaffected students and teach writing and language skills.

"When I was still in the classroom, I had students who could argue the finer points of wielding maces versus daggers quite eloquently, and I thought, 'Where is this passion for the parts of the cell or for genetics?'"

The students write argumentative pieces, poetry, character tweets, and analyze the plots of quest chains. They also read J.R.R. Tolkien’s "The Hobbit" to analyze Bilbo’s archetypical "hero’s quest" in relation to WoW level progression. A fully developed course aligned to middle-school standards will be available freely under a Creative Commons license.

Comments

Post Comment
Hell yeah :o
# Jan 25 2011 at 7:28 AM Rating: Decent
Best. Class. Ever.

How different school would have been for me to "go home and play Duke Nukem 3D for an hour, then play Doom for an hour and explain the primary graphic differences and plotline holes".

*envy*
nice
# Jan 25 2011 at 4:00 AM Rating: Decent
*
70 posts
its too bad they didnt have something like this when i was in school. would have loved to play video games for assignments. "now go home class and go play final fantasy so we can discuss it in tomorrows class. and whoever lvls up the highest gets a gold star" or something like that :)
Post Comment

Free account required to post

You must log in or create an account to post messages.