Friday, November 17, 2006

Re-post: Education in WoW - June 05

From Wednesday, June 22, 2005

The WoW obsession continues. Here's something I posted to the eo list about it after it had been mentioned by someone else, which is based on part of the HE report that we're working on:

"Funnily enough I was starting to put our annual HE report together yesterday and part of it included setting out what the children have learned from the game (given we've all spent so much time on it recently). These are the skills WoW has helped them to develop:

Map-reading and compass skills;
Working out sequences;
Hand-eye co-ordination;
European languages (a lot of non-English players on the European servers - my kids have picked up an amazing amount of French, German & Swedish just from having to work out what they're saying!);
Socialising and working in groups - the game is *really* good for developing teamwork skills;
Arithmetic - e.g. how much to buy silk? Then to sell it as a bolt of cloth? How much profit if I make it into a garment? How many xp points to level up, divided by number of xp points earned from completing quests, killing monsters etc..;
Keyboard skills - they're all superfast typists now, even the ones who weren't before;
Spelling & syntax - because you have to make yourself understood properly, very quickly & under pressure;
Commerce - they've learned how an auction works and a lot of principles of commodity trading about which they were previously unaware;
Research - they've used Thottbot, Kaldorei and several other support pages & sites to research quests, levels, classes, professions & abilities and applied this to improving their game.

All in all it's the best £35 we've spent on home ed resources we've spent! Um... three times... We have 3 accounts between us now. What works really well, we've found, is when you have lots of characters and share the professions out then pool resources.

But I think it would be a much better game if they added elements of the Sims and let characters/ guilds buy houses. Also there's room for more professions I think, some of which could be home-based."


posted by Gill at 9:43 AM 4 comments

1 Comments:

Blogger Schuyler said...

I love these kinds of posts. There are two great posts about the myriad of learning that occurs in WoW in two parts. Part 1 is here and part two is here.

I love that you are using yours for your HE report.

5:38 pm, February 24, 2007  

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