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WoWinSchool project nabs Gamification Summit 2013 award
Everything they learned, they learned from World of Warcraft -- or in this case, everything they taught. Congratulations are in order for WoW players and educators Lucas Gillispie and Peggy Sheehy, whose WoWinSchool program has earned a GAward for Best Use of Engagement Techniques in Education at the Gamification Summit 2013 taking place now in San Francisco. The award recognizes the effective use engagement techniques such as loyalty, gamification, and behavioral science in programs, apps, projects, campaigns, and companies. "WoW in School: The Hero's Journey" is a full-year language arts course for middle school students. While the program was initially targeted for "at-risk" youths, Gillispie and Sheehy quickly saw that the approach was a hit with learners of all abilities and backgrounds. Don't we wish our own teachers had been so open-minded and current? See how Gillispie and Sheehy win the hearts and minds of their young students in our in-depth interviews with the dynamic educators, Learn to game to game to learn and WoW goes to English class.
World of ClassCraft inspires kids to work hard in school
Would you have done better in high school physics if it had been gameified? In this BBC report, Mr. Young, a physics teacher in Quebec, Canada, explains that doing just that has made a difference in his own classroom. Mr. Young divides his students into groups of eight, and within each group students are offered the role of a warrior, priest, or mage. Each start out with a few base abilities, and can earn more through the accumulation and expenditure of experience points. How do you earn experience points? By turning in assignments on time, behaving yourself in class, and helping others with their homework. Each character also has hit points, just like in WoW, and you can lose hit points through poor classroom behavior or missing homework deadlines. If your hit points go to zero, you earn yourself a detention or some other sort of penalty. But your teammates can help you out, too. Warriors, with their large hit point pool, can soak damage, and priests can heal it back. Like this, teams are encouraged to work together and help each other learn the material. Mr. Young calls the whole system "World of ClassCraft" in honor of WoW, which it imitates.
15 Minutes of Fame: WoW goes to English class
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. Remember when we interviewed the two teachers who were injecting motivation, teamwork, and pride into at-risk students via an after-school World of Warcraft program? Educators Lucas Gillispie and Peggy Sheehy are still at it -- and this time, they've scooted the gaming back squarely into school hours with an elective language arts enrichment class for 15 middle school students. "Our kids are embarking on a Hero's Journey as they compare their own experiences in World of Warcraft to those of Bilbo Baggins in Tolkien's The Hobbit," explains Gillispie. "They're engaging in creative projects as well, such as live tweeting the events leading to Cataclysm from NPC's points-of-view (see #wowinschool hashtag). They're creating digital propaganda posters related to in-world events, writing riddles to share with players on their server, and learning leadership through their student guild." Sounds great in theory -- but we wondered what the kids themselves thought about the program. So we asked three of them, all new to the World of Warcraft, what they think about the game itself, what they feel they're getting out of the class, and whether or not the experience has given them any new perspectives on gaming.
