I was somehow thinking most students would be level 10, 11, or 12 already and we’d all be arranging to meet near a big town or city to begin classifying living things. Yeah, that ain’t happening. I don’t even know if we’ll get there by next week! So six class periods and all we’ve done is play World of Warcraft (WoW). A majority of students have been really enjoying getting to play WoW during class time. If you take the game playing at face value there is a lot of thinking, decision-making, problem-solving, and cooperation going on. There is plenty of research on game playing like this on the brain and it’s very positive. Just watch a kid play a game like WoW and you’ll see.
So even though we haven’t gotten to the Science yet I’m still expecting the Science part to be great and for kids to get a good understanding of what it will take to classify and organize living things. I’m really excited to see how the different teams will go about it. I bet structure and function will come into play, segueing nicely into the NGSS Structure and Function standard this project will be addressing.
Day 6 went smoothly. No tech problems aside from another case of WoW crashing, the fatal exception error 132, which was easily fixed by having the student move to a different computer. Thank goodness my classes are small enough that we have extra computers! Kids in both classes still needed my help today but not as many or as much as Day 5 in the afternoon class. Some kids are leveling up slowly, slower than the rest of their peers, so we’ll see how I decide when to start the class WoW meeting to split up into groups to begin classification.
We’ll see how far we get next week, the week before our Winter Break. As it stands now, it’s looking like we’ll need to play some more after Winter Break. I’m sure kids won’t mind. 🙂
