Minecraft or WoW Science Lesson - Classifying Organisms

After taking a break from the whole education-twitter-blogosphere, I came back to read my blog feed and came across Alfonzo Gonzalez's series of posts about using World of Warcraft (WoW) in his 8th grade science class to teach students about classification of organisms. I wanted to document my thoughts on this engaging lesson idea as well as present my own ideas for adapting this lesson.

My thoughts on using WoW for a lesson on classifying organisms:

While thinking about the pros and cons of Alfonzo's lesson, I started thinking that perhaps Minecraft could do the job just as well without many of the major hassles of WoW. Don't get me wrong, I love WoW as much as the next gamer, having several level 90s myself. However, I worry that it took 9 class periods for students to actually get to the science topic and experiment at hand. I started thinking about my own WoW knowledge, and yes, there are a lot of different organisms in the WoW world, however to fully experience that vastness, you would need to play through to near level cap (90), which takes even the most experienced and dedicated of players 2+ days of play time (48+ hours in total). If students only reach level 10, which for comparison is reachable by an experienced player in about one hour, the number of organisms available to see is quite diminished on the scale of all organisms in WoW. For example, there are 82 different types of "beast" in game, that doesn't include the different subtypes, i.e. you could say there are 82 different species of beast in WoW not including different sub-species, however if you are only level 10 and in an area known as Elywnn Forest for example you can only find 4 species of beast, and a very small fraction of the sub-species of those 4.

This line of thought led me to think that Minecraft would have just as many, if not more organisms available to the student in a much shorter span of time. With the latest Minecraft release of 1.7, there are now more flora and fauna, for example, there are now 13 types of flower, 32 animals/mythical creatures, around 12 types of tree, and some other random stuff like mushrooms. As for sub-species, you can dye and breed 15 colours of sheep, and there are 35 "breeds" of horse.

So I wanted to test out my theory, so I jumped on a random Minecraft world for 14 minutes and found:

• Trees - 5 types
• Grasses - 8 types/colours
• Cactus
• Sugar cane
• Flowers - 8 types
• Wheat
• Carrot
• Pumpkins - 2 colours
• Mushrooms - 2 types
• Sheep - 3 colours
• Cows
• Pigs
• Chicken
• Horse - 5 colours
• Squid
• Spider 
• Creeper (The iconic Minecraft monster)
• Villager
• Zombie 
• Skeleton 
• Enderman (A large humanoid with long arms and legs that enjoys moving blocks)

Then I jumped on WoW, as a new level 1 Human character and ran around Elwynn Forest for 14 minutes, died 3 times (murloc, wolf and bandit) and found:

• Flowers - 5 types (1 pick-able and 4 ornamental)
• Grasses - 2 types (ornamental)
• Vine
• Tree - 3 types
• Bush - 3 types (ornamental)
• Reeds (another ornamental grass)
• Pumpkins
• Goblins
• Orcs
• Kobold (It is like a rat-man)
• Demonic imp
• Rabbits - 2 colours
• Worgs (like a wolf)
• Deer
• Grey horse
• Squirrel
• Frogs - 2 colours
• Sheep - 2 colours
• Wolves
• Murlocs (It is like a fish-man)
• Cows
• Boars
• Bears
• Cats - 6 colours

Overall, I felt that the variety of things available to look at and categorise was quite similar for Minecraft and low level WoW. I wouldn't expect a student who is new to these games to find as many things so quickly, but I wanted some kind of comparison of the diversity of organisms available to the new player of each game. In Minecraft the teacher can create the world and add to it in such a way that the flora and fauna are easier to find, however in WoW, you could create many low level characters and investigate the starter zones for each race, categorising the flora and fauna. Which lead me to another idea of how to organise using WoW for teaching classification of organisms (see below).

An adaption of Alfonzo's WoW lesson for classifying organisms:

Some organisms in a starter area in WoW

Students are role playing as biologists visiting a new world (Azeroth), their task is to classify and document as many living things as possible, to draw pictures (or use screenshots) and document interesting things about the organism, relative size, colour, distinguishing features and to name any unnamed organisms. Students should classify these organisms and describe why they believe the organism belongs in that class of organism and present their findings in a format of their choice, such as a presentation, or a scientific report.

The main difference to Alfonzo's lesson is that I would ask students to break into several groups, depending on what faction and race they choose, thus the class as a whole does not need to choose any one race or faction. Furthermore, I would only want to give students no more than 1 lesson to create their character and learn how to move around in game. Students will then explore only the starting area for the race they have chosen to play and classify the organisms within that area. This is achievable without having to gain any levels. When I ran my test to see how many organisms I could find on a level 1 character in WoW I found the majority of things in the starter zone, there was little need to venture out further. For example, the screenshot above was taken a few steps away from where you arrive in the world if you play a Night Elf.

An added bonus to having several small expedition groups is that you can then ask students to present their findings to the rest of the class in some format. This helps to ensure that students take the task seriously. This is something that scientists exploring uncharted areas would also be required to do; report their findings to their peers. This leaves open further opportunities to continue with the role play and work together as a class to create, for example, a book of all the organisms they found in Azeroth, and debate together on the correct classification of the organisms.

The benefit I see in this adaptation is that students still work in groups, but we don't need to take several lessons to get to a point where students can start working on the science task at hand. The further benefit is that, with taking less time, there are then more opportunities to come back to the game for other science experiments and projects.
 

A Minecraft adapted lesson for classifying organisms:

A selection of Minecraft organisms forced into one small area.

So the story would be the same, students role play as biologists in a newly discovered world (which I would edit to be a little more organism rich than the random world I used for my test). Students are again asked to classify and document as many organisms as possible, and present their findings in a choice of formats etc, etc.

Minecraft has the bonus of making things easily measurable since you have large blocks which are made up of smaller blocks, so you could measure a flower by small blocks and trees by blocks. i.e. this flower was 12 mini blocks high, but the tree was 18 full blocks high. Or you could use some maths and say that one full block is 1m x 1m x 1m and made up of 16x16x16 mini blocks, so the mini block is 1/16th of a metre in height.

There are a few options for exactly how to run this, you could run multiple servers, so students adventure through the new world in small groups. You could run one large server and have all students in together, which would largely depend on your schools computer and your ability to change server settings such as how much RAM is allocated to the server program. You could even run multiple copies of the same world and let each student explore it solo. After deciding this, you then have the choice of whether to make it a "creative" mode world, where everyone can fly(!!) and no one can die, but there is the potential downside of students using the unlimited inventory to alter the number of organisms and types of organisms in the world. The other option is to make it a "survival" mode world, with the main downside being that characters can die, and you cannot fly.

If you want to continue with the several small expedition groups exploring different areas with different organisms idea, as with the WoW adaptation above, it would not be too difficult to create 5 or more different Minecraft worlds, each with a different biome and different organisms.

In summary, I like Alfonzo's idea a lot, however I think I'd like to try it with Minecraft rather than using WoW, simply to remove the cons of dealing with students needing to spend several lessons learning how to play the game and not die and dealing with the wider WoW player base. While overall, WoW has a much greater variety of organisms to classify, the time it takes students to learn how to play and the limited amount of organisms on show to low level characters (without creating multiple characters and races) makes me think Minecraft might work equally as well if not better.