Unschooling and homeschooling using WoW to teach!

Here is yet another article referencing the educational benefits of WoW (as a game which is representative of MMORPG's). Click this link to read the article.

There is a lot of talk in this article about "unschooling"-- a school of thought that promotes a certain brand of homeschooling in which parents allow their children to pursue various (often recreational) interests, and the parents engage in these activities with them. For example, one child started playing WoW, and his mom got an account and started playing too. The parents say that they use the experiences in the game to explain real-life situations, or show how lessons learned in-game can be apply to other aspects of life as well.

Here is one example of such an interaction as described by the article,

She has watched Luke, 10, make his own learning connections between "WoW" and other areas in life.

One day he became interested in the mathematical concept of exponential increases after his "WoW" character encountered a disease cloud.

"Just in his ponderings, he asked 'Mom, what if someone got infected and he walks into a room with four people, and they leave and each walk into a room with four people?'" Parmer recalled.

She told him, yes, that could happen, and added another fact about not all people getting infected at the same rate in the real world.

What is interesting to note here is not necessarily that the child learned some new mathematical formula, but isntead that he was willingly thinking about it. Just by thinking about the information, people (in general) can learn effectively, especially when this thinking leads to curiosity which leads to some form of research. When you research a topic because you are dying to understand something, you are likely much more capable of efficient and effective learning than if a task to do the same research was thrust upon you. The child was curious about the possibility of spreading the disease and he wanted to understand it, and so he did research to find out if his suspicions were true. Granted his source for information was his mother, but nonetheless, he made an attempt to further his own knowledge.

Personally, when I read about this example, I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to write an equation which would allow you to "predict" the number of individuals infected (y) during a certain 'certain' generation of the disease (x). What I came up with was that the number of newly infected (and thus contagious) individuals during a given generation of the disease would be equal to 4^(g), where 'g'= the generation of the disease. Thus in generation=0 (when only the original individual was infected), there were 4^0=1 newly infected people. After that person walked into the room of four people (the 1st generation), there were 4^1=4 newly infected people. When those 4 newly infected people walked into a new room, thus each infecting 4 new people, the number of newly infected was 4^2=16. In order to predict the TOTAL number of infected people during a given generation of the disease (not just the number newly infected/'contagious' individuals), you need to do a summation of the number of newly infected people from each of the previous generations, such that that the # of people infected in the 3rd generation of the disease = (4^0)+(4^1)+(4^2)+(4^3)= 85 total infected individuals in the 3rd generation (and 4^3=64 newly infected/contagious individuals). I didn't represent the formula as a summation here because I dont know how to get that symbol in this text (:p). Furthermore, I didn't bother to integrate the summation in order to simplify it (I think that's what you do next...) because I haven't looked at calculus in 4 years, and had already been told I was taking this math too far (go figure). Either way, you can see how this statement about a disease spreading in WoW triggered my interest enough to get me to spend a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how to represent this occurence mathematically, thus causing me to use and re-learn (and a bit of new learning not mentioned here because this post is already too long ;) ) some math. Go WoW (and those who talk about it)!!!!

***TOO LONG DIDN'T READ VERSION (tldr)*** My curiosty caused me to do a bunch of work and learn some math. Why did I become this curious? Because of a question relating to WoW. This can happen to anyone, thus WoW can instigate learning for those who play the game.