Blog feedICET 2007: World of Warcraft demo
November 23rd, 2007One of the anticipated highlights of the conference was the presentation by Professor Angeline Khoo from NIE in Singapore. Her presentation was called Active Learning through Gaming. It seems that Professor Khoo is a World of Warcraft (WoW) player and the session was advertised as follows:
Looking back to the 24th of July, 2007, World of Warcraft, the award winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) made by Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. has officially surpassed the 9 million subscribers mark. What makes the game successful and how has it become a defining icon of online gaming entertainment? Why have 9 million people around the world given their time to it?
In the Gaming Demonstration at ICET 2007, we will “walk” through a gaming scene from World of Warcraft. There, players will form a team to fight an enemy (termed as the BOSS). Team members will learn how to plan, coordinate, and strategize in order to prepare themselves to attack and defeat the BOSS.
Players are constantly tested as the game progresses with new abilities and challenges. To look at it from another angle, the player has to gain the ability to learn, adapt, and implement his skills in the world to ensure the continued survival of its gaming character. The result: better learning rates, as well as higher levels of logical thinking, and coordination.
Come join us for the full insight on how gaming, and in particular World of Warcraft, can play a significant role in shaping the future of learning in gaming.
I must confess that I have yet to delve into and invest the necessary time required to make progress with WoW so I was interested to see what they were doing with this game in relation to its application in teaching and learning. Professor Khoo talked about how she has become hooked on this game and how important her avatar is to her. She has invested a lot of time in its creation and evolution and it has helped her make friends in her Guild, friends who come from all over the world. She demonstrated it in action in relation to how one would interact with another player. The text message system worked perfectly although the voice communication did not work.
Then Profesor Khoo invited a group of adults who were teachers and ICT professional on to the stage so that a live raid could take place in the game. Unfortunately there were some technical problems so the ‘raid’ was 10 mins late in starting! When it did start it was good to see how the team worked together in order to co-ordinate attacks on enemy monsters.
The question and answer session was interesting and points raised included:
- issues about connectivity with such games via school network
- how does current curriculum architecture facilitate the time required to make meaningful progress within the game?
- what are people learning when they play this game?
- is it appropriate to collaborate to kill in a game, and do to this in school?
- how do you balance your life when this game demands a lot of time?
- how can we make explicit the learning that implicitly happens within the game?
I wasn’t wholly convinced that this presentation would make me want to use this in my classroom although it does make me consider how such games could be used to help develop leadership skills and team dynamics. No doubt you have other ideas so I’d love to hear from anyone else that is using WoW in their practice.