GAMING Bridget McCrea Schools across the country are mapping their curriculum to the fantasy RPG World of Warcraft, proving that students can learn a surprising amount from dwarves, elves, and orcs. WoWing Language Arts hen the final bell of the day rings at 2: 35 p. m. at Suffern Middle School , Peggy Sheehy takes off her hat as instructional technology facilitator for the Ramapo Central School District and becomes the World of Warcraft ( WoW) director for the Suffern, NY, institution. As she wraps up the school day in her glassed- in office, Sheehy watches students file into the library and seat themselves in front of computers. Sheehy ( the “ lorekeeper”) manually logs them into the online game, where players take on roles of heroic fantasy characters in a mystery world. “ Okay, heroes, where are we today? What are we working on?” Sheehy asks the group of middle and high school students ( who “ come back” to middle school for the program) participating in the after- school WoW club. While they’re completing quests and interacting with players around the world, the students are plugged in at a deeper level, learning from a special curriculum, which blends the game with common core standards and focuses on, but is not limited to, language arts. “ We realized that students were spending hours on end playing video games, but we couldn’t get them to do 15 minutes on their English homework,” says Sheehy. “ We started making connections between virtual gaming and classroom instruction.” Already experimenting with the use of avatars to help shy students participate in class and to help develop new classroom leaders, Sheehy was part of the founding group that formed the Cognitive Dissonance WoW guild ( an alliance formed within the game itself) in 2007 to further explore the game- education relationship. She says WoW was selected solely because of its wide popularity among students. It didn’t take Sheehy long to pick up on WoW’s hidden curriculum, which included learning folklore through literature, vocabulary building, and socialization and digital literacy skills. Collaborating remotely with fellow teachers Lucas Gillispie and Craig Lawson at Pender County Schools in Burgaw, NC, on the World of Warcraft in School Project, Sheehy set out to demonstrate the value of commercial, off- the- shelf games for curricular integration. In World of Warcraft, players seek to level- up via virtual avatars of human or mythical creatures, like dwarves, orcs, and night elves through series of quests and raids. | SEPTEMBER 2012 24