World of Warcraft as a teaching tool

 World of Warcraft as a teaching tool Most of us were kids at one point. A portion of us probably played computer or video games even as kids. Thus, I’m sure that at least a good handful of us, when told by our parents to turn off the computer and go do homework, eat dinner, or get some fresh air, tried to counter with something like this: “But Mom, games are educational! They give you hand-eye coordination and map reading skills!” Now, all these years later, it seems we may finally be getting some backup from teachers and educators. recently highlighted some educators who are using World of Warcraft or lauding it for its educational values.Educator Constance Steinkuehler of the University of Wisconsin-Madison started an after school WoW playing group for young boys. She’s found that these 8th and 9th graders, who had no interesting in reading or writing, now get into detailed and lengthy discussions on raid strategy and gearing up and the like on their message boards. They also meet one Saturday a month for more involved projects such as maintaining the guild website or putting together graphic novels based on their Warcraft adventures, which provides

Scattered Shots: On Roleplaying a Hunter

Scattered Shots: On Roleplaying a Hunter Welcome to Scattered Shots, a weekly column on all things Hunter related, now written by Daniel Whitcomb. I may have mentioned this before elsewhere, but often times it’s hard to speak authoritatively on any class in Beta, because no matter what the changes and the new imba combos and whatnot are right now, they will likely change drastically the next time a new build comes into play. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible to write about them, but often times whatever words you write will be obsolete, or at least inaccurate, by the time you sit down to write next week’s column. For example, last week I wrote about traps. I mentioned that Freezing Traps no longer break immediately on damage. Well, now they do again. As Ghostcrawler tells it, they couldn’t find a way to make pets automatically ignore a frozen target, so they called the whole thing off. Now, honestly, that seems a bit like chopping off your hand to take care of a mosquito bite on your pinky finger, but hey. On the plus side, she also said that they’ll put it back in once they figure out how to reign in pets (I recommend using the passive