Report on Sim-on-a-Stick as an Education Tool

I just talked about the real world commercial applications of Sim-on-a-Stick (or SoaS) made by Renee "Ener Hax" Miller, and now Ms. Hax tells me about a cool application of SoaS for learning: Here's the summary of a paper by Lisa Jacka and Kate Booth of Southern Cross University (be sure to read the .pdf at the link), recounting their experiences with SoaS in an educational context. SoaS, the authors write, enables schools to use a virtual world inside a school system's firewall, and one of the projects they note in the full report is this recreation of a Nairobi village students built together, pictured here. I see this as a solution alongside Minecraft for education.

For instance, first teach the basics of 3D creativity and exploration in Minecraft, then graduate the kids to scripting and more complicated building in SoaS?

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Comments

[Pussycat Catnap]

LLs: -All- of this business could have been yours, and was, not that long ago...

[Graham Mills]

Kudos to all and not forgetting Roger Stack who made it possible.

[Douglas Story]

While reading the pdf, I was very surprised to see that one of the teachers had used the "StormEye" build that Desdemona Enfield and I made as inspiration for her students. They made their own mini-versions of it!

I wish the teachers had contacted us, as we would have been happy to supply them with more resources relating the StormEye.

By the way, StormEye is currently without a home in SL. If anyone wants to host us, please let me know!

[Douglas Story]

A short video about StormEye:

http://bigfatlies.net/StormEyeWalkthrough.htm

[Kate Booth]

Hi Douglas, had I known that I could contact you I would have loved to and I will for the next weather unit I use at school =D Your build is one of my favourites and the students loved seeing the images and video. This gives them wonderful ideas of how they can adapt and build their virtual projects. Fabulous creative interpretation of weather and the power of the storm.

Cheers
Kate Booth
Twitter @SCU006 SL captainflint006

[Ener Hax]

Roger Stack and Crista Lopes are the ones that made this possible, i only am a curator of it =)

Roger is always listed in the acknowledgments and linked online from the SoaS site =)

[term papers]

This post is useful for my term paper writing, thanks!