What It Means
Quest – an assignment.
Challenge – a smaller component of a quest. Examples of challenges:
- Tavern Talks – threaded discussions or live discussions. In fantasy lore, the local tavern is where tales are told and where adventures begin.
- The Hero’s Journal – a place for personal reflection. Though readable by other Heroes, no discussion is permitted.
IRL – gamer lingo for “in real life.” These challenges take place primarily outside the game.
Adventures in Azeroth – These challenges take place primarily inside World of Warcraft.
Lore and Legend – These challenges relate specifically to our book study and literature circles for learners.
XP/Level – experience points. Really, this is how games like World of Warcraft indicate to the player their mastery of content. As learners complete challenges, they earn experience points, these accumulate as the player completes content, and subsequently they gain player levels. There are rubrics included to show what must be done to earn certain levels of experience points for certain challenges.
Lorekeepers – experienced guides alongside learners.
Heroes – students.
Literature Circles - groups of heroes who come together to share and discuss a famous legend at great length. This hero centered approach is not driven by your Lorekeeper. Instead, every week you will be responsible for reading a chapter of The Hobbit on your own for independent study. Then, you will be required to complete a discussion log for your meeting preparation. Finally, you will setup a weekly meeting with 2 - 5 other guild mates to discuss a chapter of the book. During this meeting, you will be responsible for positively participating in the group and giving feedback on your participation and preparation of your guild mates. Click here to review guidelines for completing each step of the literature circle process.
Based on - WoW In School: A Hero's Journey, by Lucas Gillispie and Craig Lawson - which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
We are grateful for the support and experience shared by humanities teacher Peggy Sheehy and the students of Ramapo Middle School for their support as we design our own Hero's Journey.