Teamwork through World of Warcraft

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 * bgcolor="#b4b4b4" style="border: 0px #cccccc solid;" |Grade Level: High School/College
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 * bgcolor="#b4b4b4" style="border: 0px #cccccc solid;" |Subject: Humanities Course
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 * bgcolor="#b4b4b4" style="border: 0px #cccccc solid;" |Sub-Subject: The Benefits of Teamwork in a Society
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 * bgcolor="#b4b4b4" style="border: 0px #cccccc solid;" |Length/Duration: 3-4 days
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 * bgcolor="#b4b4b4" style="border: 0px #cccccc solid;" |Technologies Used: World of Warcraft
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Introduction/Specifications
The World of War Craft (a.k.a. WoW) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game which takes place within the Warcraft world of Azeroth.

For this lesson, students will be asked to create an avatar, explore their surroundings, fight various monsters, complete quests, and interact with other players. It is important to be sure that each student is apart of the same realm so that they can interact within the same world.

To create a new character,players must choose between the opposing factions of Alliance or Horde. Characters from the opposing factions can perform minor communication, but only members of the same faction can speak, email, group, and share guilds. For the sake of this particular lesson, half of the students will join the Alliance faction and the other half will join the Horde faction. The player selects the new character's race (species), and a class for the character, with choices such as mages, warriors and priests.

As characters become more developed through quests and other adventures, they gain various talents and skills, that will require students to further define the abilities of that character (i.e. blacksmithing, mining, cooking, fishing, and first aid).

Students will focus on questing for this several day lesson since the central focus is on teamwork and playing your role in a society and seeing how your contributions are apart of a greater whole. Quests usually reward the player with experience points, items, and/or in-game money.

While a character can be played on its own, players can also group up with others in order to tackle more challenging content. In this way, character classes are used in specific roles within a group.[28][30] World of Warcraft uses a "rested bonus" system, increasing the rate that a character can gain experience points after the player has spent time away from the game.[26] When a character dies, it becomes a ghost (or wisp for Night Elf characters) at a nearby graveyard.[31] Characters can be resurrected by other characters that have the ability, or can self-resurrect by moving from the graveyard to the place where they died. When a character dies, the items equipped by the character degrade, requiring in-game money and a specialist NPC to repair them. Items that have degraded heavily become unusable until they are repaired. If the location of the character's body is unreachable, they can use a special NPC known as a spirit healer to resurrect at the graveyard. When the spirit healer revives a character, items equipped by the character at that time suffer increased degradation, and the character is significantly weakened for ten minutes. This "Resurrection Sickness" does not occur and item degradation is less severe if the character revives by locating its body, or is resurrected by another player, through special items or spells.[32][33]

World of Warcraft contains a variety of mechanisms for player-versus-player (PvP) play. Some realms allow player-versus-player combat almost anywhere in the game world, at any time. In these environments, members of opposing factions can attack each other at almost any time or location. Player-versus-environment (PvE) servers, by contrast, allows a player to choose whether or not to engage in combat against other players. On both server types, there are special areas of the world where free-for-all combat is permitted. Players on PvE servers can also opt to "flag" themselves, making them attackable targets to players of the opposite faction.[34] Battlegrounds, for example, are similar to dungeons: only a set number of characters can enter a single battleground, but additional copies of the battleground can be made to accommodate additional players.[35] Each battleground has a set objective, such as capturing a flag or defeating an opposing general, that must be completed in order to win the battleground. Competing in battlegrounds rewards the character with tokens and honor points that can be used to buy armour and weapons.[34]

Setting World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. In addition to sharing the "Warcraft" name with the real-time strategy games in the Warcraft series, it is set in the world of Azeroth and has similar art direction.[21]

World of Warcraft takes place in a 3D representation of the Warcraft universe that players can interact with through their characters. The game world initially features two continents of Azeroth (Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms), with two separate expansions adding the realm of Outlands and the continent of Northrend adding to the playable area. In this game world, players use their characters to explore locations, defeat creatures, and complete quests, among other activities. Doing these, characters gain experience that allows them to attain higher levels, gain access to new skills and abilities, explore new areas, and attempt new quests.[31] As a player explores new locations, different routes and means of transportion become available. Players can access "flight masters" in newly discovered locations to fly to previously discovered locations in other parts of the world.[36] Players can also use boats, zeppelins, or portals to move from one continent to another. Although the game world remains reasonably similar from day to day, seasonal events reflecting real world events such as Halloween,[37] Christmas, Children's Week,[34] Easter and Midsummer have been added. Locations also have variable weather including, among other things, rain, snow, and dust storms.[36]

A number of facilities are available for characters while in towns and cities. In each major city characters can access a bank in order to deposit items, such as treasure or crafted items. Each character has access to personal bank storage with the option to purchase additional storage space using in-game gold.[38] Additionally, guild banks are available for use by members of a guild with restrictions being set by the guild leader.[39] Auction houses are also available for players to buy and sell items to others in a similar way to online auction sites such as eBay.[40] Players can also use mailboxes, which can be found in almost every town. The mailbox can be used to collect items won at auction and also to send messages, items and even in-game money to other characters.[26]

Some of the harder challenges in World of Warcraft require players to group together to defeat them. These usually take place in dungeons, also known as instances, that a group of characters can enter together. The term comes from each group or party having a separate copy or instance of the dungeon, complete with their own enemies to defeat and their own treasure or rewards.[41] This allows players to explore areas and complete quests without other players outside the group interfering. Dungeons are spread over the game world and are designed for characters of varying progression. A typical dungeon will allow up to five characters to enter as part of a group. Some dungeons require more players to group together and form a raid of limited size (up to forty players) to face some of the most difficult challenges.[42] As well as dungeon-based raid challenges, several creatures exist in the normal game environment that are designed for raids to attack

The focus of this lesson will involve quests


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Ideas/Examples
Students will download their 10-day trial of the game at the following site listed below:

https://us.battle.net/account/creation/wow/signup/

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Software
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Articles that Support this Lesson
Dewey, J. (1916). Demogracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education(pp.49-62). New York, NY: The Macmillan Company.

Stigler, J.W., & Hiebert, J. (2009). The teaching gap: Best ideas from the world's teachers for improving education in the classroom (pp.25-54). New York, NY: Free Press.

Gentner, D., & Loewenstein, J., & Thompson, L. (2003). Learning and transfer: A general role for analogical encoding. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(2), 393-405.

Barab, S., Scott, B., Siyahhan, S., Goldstone, R., Ingram-Goble, A., Zuiker, S., et al. (2009). Transformational play as a cirricular scaffold: Using videogames to support science education. Journal of Science and Educational Technology, 18(4) 305-320.

Gee, J. (2008). Games for learning institute. Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/4513412

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