I had both 8th grade classes decide on whether they wanted to play for the Alliance or for the Horde by straight majority rule. My 2nd period class is playing Horde and my 4th period class is playing Alliance! Pretty cool and provides an opportunity to have them share their experiences.
Then I gave students some time to choose a character race and the class for their character. I used this resource I got from Peggy Sheehy to have students decide which class to play since not all WoW races can play all the classes.
Once students decided on a character I had them pick a name for their character, then I shared the usernames and passwords for the accounts we would use. Basically the emails and passwords are similar, making it easier for me to create them, and each student got a different number (the only difference). I asked students to sit together by race (which sounded worse than it really was because I meant WoW race!). Since the free starter edition doesn’t allow in-game type chatting students need to talk to each other when they need help. There was a lot of verbal helping going in the computer lab! 🙂
In the computer we had just enough time to start a new character and some even got to try a quest or two. Students enjoyed choosing races and classes and customizing their characters. Some spent the whole time doing just that. There were a couple of snags. Some found it confusing to get to the correct server or realm and it took them a couple of tries and starting a character at least twice. I think tomorrow we should get that all figured out.
The other snag came from a built in security feature that if you log in to play WoW on different computers your account gets locked until you prove it’s you and not some hacker! Really good if you are getting hacked but an inconvenience if there’s a student using an account that I tested at home! I had to reset two passwords. Not bad for day 1.
Science wasn’t very scientific today, unless you count experimenting with figuring out how to play WoW, but it was rather fun.
