Leeroy Jenkins

Why WoW is a educational game:
"I think leeroy was so selfish he spoild all the plans if we paled a game
like this it wold make us better team workers and stuff"
coreyf the Miniligends, grade 3
http://alupton.wordpress.com/2006/05/30/leeroy-jenkins/

Leeroy Jenkins

World of Warcraft raids take hours of meticulous planning with up to 40 players meeting online to plan and execute a raid. Raid groups are carefully composed with a mix of skills and with VoIP communication, players carefully coordinate their attack.

It is a nonsence to portray gaming as a solitary exercise of the socially inept or to ignore the learning that is involved.

See how Leeroy can destroy all this in minutes. Play the 2.5 minute video at http://www.leeroyjenkins.net/

Teaching physics through game programming

Pete Border has excellent resources for teaching physics through game creation.

Pete's work is excellent:
http://www.maapt.org/programs/talks/maapt_20041030_border.ppt describes the pedagogy
http://webusers.physics.umn.edu/~border/phys1905f02/ has slides, Excel sheets, Python and Blender source.

This tertiary course has been adapted for a secondary school summer camp :
http://www.umcrookston.edu/camps/documents/pdf/cybercamp_brochure2006_web.pdf

Interest in game programming by country

Here is an analysis of the interest in the educational use of computer game programming by country using Clustrmaps http://clustrmaps.com

	total	Australia	UK&Ireland	USA
Pop million		20	60	283
http://www.mindtools.tased.edu.au/gamemaker/default.htm	8780	3070	550	6640
hits/million pop			9	23
http://www.freewebs.com/schoolgamemaker/	887	765	55	575
hits/million pop			0.9	2.0
http://www.gamelearning.net/	2955	270	550	1405
hits/million pop		13.5		5.0

It is obvious that you cannot use a site's map to gauge relative interest in a topic in its host country, there's a strong "home town" effect. It is interesting that the 2 Australian sites both found that interest per capita was twice as high in USA as UK. Then, based on one site, Australian interest per capita was almost 3 times as high as USA.

Another analysis can be done with http://www.google.com/trends . Note that statistics for search terms are normalised on a % of searches basis. If a city rates highly its not because it has more searches of that term but that term is more likely to be used in its total of searches.

Search gamemaker:

1.	Brisbane Australia
2.	Amsterdam Netherlands
3.	Adelaide Australia
4.	Perth Australia
5.	Auckland New Zealand
6.	Melbourne Australia
7.	Stockholm Sweden
8.	Sydney Australia
9.	Helsinki Finland
10.	Seattle, WA USA

Note that Estonia wins on a per country basis and Australia comes third (I dont understand)

Australian cities, notably Brisbane win on Constructivism, Metacognition and Pedagogy. Interestingly if you search instruction or instructional, USA fills all 10 top places but for instructional design, India wins.

I also had fun with war/peace, love/hate etc. Its also fun to look at time trends

You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired!

In Wired Magazine http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn.html the following quote:

"To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. Guilds routinely splinter over petty squabbles and other basic failures of management; the master must resolve them without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Never mind the virtual surroundings; these conditions provide real-world training a manager can apply directly in the workplace."