Where or how can I develop a virtual world for elementary students that is education based?

[Vanessa Ewbank]

I am working on opening a private school that has an online component and am very interested in using a virtual environment for this. I would also like to use virtual worlds during instruction in the traditional classroom setting. However, I do not know where to go to have a world setup or who to contact. Second Life's set-up would be great, but the two sites they run do not account for the age group I am looking to work with. I have investigated some of the virtual game sites and am looking to implement them at the school, but I am really wanting a place where I can run a class and set forth the curriculum to be studied etc. Any ideas or direction would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Vanessa

[Azwaldo Villota]

As you said, Second Life® (SL) is not an option for your students; but, OpenSim provides building tools like those seen in SL and would allow you to host students of any age. OpenSim is an exciting alternative to the SL and Teen-SL grids. For example, I have already implemented features in OpenSim that are not even available in SL.

Although the application is in early development (not yet as robust as SL), there is tremendous potential with many computer programmers volunteering on the project, and there is also a lot of early activity by educators. You can find a brief introduction to the OpenSim platform with links to the website at this URL.

There are many virtual world applications. A great place to start looking around would be Rich White's blog, he is also working with the OpenSim platform.

[Vanessa Ewbank]

Thanks for the information, I really appreciate it. I'm rather new to VW but am intrigued and know that students would love it and be engaged. I see so much potential for elementary school and would love to learn more. I don't really know where to start, but I have a ton of ideas for what I would like to see for my virtual school. I'm off to read the links you provided and would love to discuss this further. Thanks again and have a great one.

[Cathy Arreguin / Mari Asturias]

Hi Vanessa,

Just to piggyback off of what Azwaldo mentions: OpenSim IS an option. Both Azwaldo and I currently support a high school science teacher currently using Reaction Grid - an OpenSim grid that is very educator friendly. In fact, our grid neighbors include an Irish Primary (Elementary) school.
I think part of the challenge is determining all the parts of a system you need functioning to be successful. Beth Wellman (the science teacher) and I will be presenting a seminar on "Real Teaching in Virtual Worlds" during the July K12 iED VW conference in Kansas City. I believe they now have a virtual way to attend! In any case, I'm committed to making sure the rubrics, frameworks, guiding development questions we present are available to K12 educators who would benefit from them. I'll make sure to let folks know when they are online somewhere :)
I really DO believe there is a place for K-6 virtual world instruction and learning!
Cathy (Mari Asturias)

[James Corbett]

Thanks for the mention Cathy, we've been working with Gaelscoil.com - a primary/elementary school here in Ireland to implement a Virtual Europe for a project funded by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs in association with an EU initiative.

We turned to Opensim for precisely the reasons mentioned above and have found the hosting services of ReactionGrid ideal for our needs. We're using a 4 region private sim for the project but when we get time I promise we'll tidy up our public Gaelscoil sim which is certainly letting down the look of our neighbourhood on RG ;-)

Thus far we've concentrated on the basics by recreating many of Europe's landmarks with basic prim and texture manipulation. Now that the kids have become really comfortable with the environment and controls we're looking at moving on to the next level - scripting in-world objects. I've recently come across what promises to be an interesting solution to this. Scratch4SL is a variant of the wonderful visual programming language for kids developed by MIT - Scratch.

For example I wanted to script the blades on our Dutch windmill to actually spin and was able to do so easily with a basic Scratch4SL routine which exported over 400 lines of LSL (Linden Scripting Language) code!! God only knows how long it would have taken us to learn how to code that in LSL ;-)

-James (Daynuv.com)

[Vanessa Ewbank]

Thanks so much for your post. I will look into Reaction Grid and see what I would need to do from there. Since this is all new, I need to look into everything and start somewhere. I'm still researching how to create the school virtually and virtual world creation in general. If it's not too nosy, how do you and Azwaldo support the high school science teacher? Thanks again.