Bored With Zoom, Professor Teaches Computer Programming in a Virtual World, And Streams It To Her Twitch -- Here's Her Advice for Other Educators

Starting at 12:30pm PT today, you can watch this Twitch channel to see yet another clever solution to teaching a large group of students in quarantine times: UC Irvine computer scientist Crista Lopes, being "sick and tired of teaching in Zoom", moved her class of 150 students to OpenSimulator, an open source virtual world. And not just to stream a video lecture to an assembly of avatars, but using OpenSim's scripting functionality so students could actually learn programming by using the virtual world's language, and building applications within it:

"The course is ICS10, a General Education course in the spirit of CS Principles," she recently reported. "There's 150 students enrolled. So far, the students have programmed in assembly on a simulated computer, used various tile walls with assorted encodings, and are now deploying and configuring a simulated Internet inside the simulated world.

"So far, everyone seems to be turning in their projects on time, and engaging. And a curious side effect has emerged of a student creating YouTube video tutorials showing how to do the projects." (See below.)

As regular readers know, Professor Lopes isn't just an OpenSim user, but one of its early pioneering lead developers. So I was curious how she customized OpenSim for her class, and how challenging it was for students to use. OpenSimulator is basically a reverse engineered version of Second Life, with a notoriously difficult UI and old graphics; Fortnite or ROBLOX it is not. (In fact, her class uses Firestorm, a viewer for accessing both Second Life and OpenSim.)

"I was expecting it to be problematic," she tells me, "and I was ready to spend many hours doing tech support, but it was surprisingly easy. There was no major hurdle, shockingly!" However, having no hurdles required a fair amount of preparation on her part, which you can read about below.

Challenges aside, she recommends OpenSim as a teaching platform to other teachers, if their course work is enhanced by a 3D immersive space and simulations --  my conversation with her below:

Above: One of Professor Lopes' student-made tutorials for the class

 

How exactly are your students deploying and configuring a simulated Internet inside the simulated world?

 

All materials are in Canvas, which is a protected system, but here is the main specification document for that project. I spent a couple of weekends developing the objects for this project. There are things in here that can only be done in OpenSim, and could not not be done in Second Life (as easily). I'm using a fair amount of OS-specific scripting functions.

 

How much will you use OpenSim like this (for teaching classes) after the pandemic?

 

If I teach this course again, which I probably will, I will use OpenSim again, independent of whether the course is online or not. As for other courses that I teach, I would have to think hard on how to develop curriculum for this media.

 

For some material, like this course I'm teaching, the value of embodied 3D social simulations is pretty obvious: I can do things that maybe I could also do in the physical world if I
had a million dollars to buy electronic toys for a very large lab, but I can also do things that I could never do in real life, like simplifying the hardware to the appropriate level of difficulty for the students, slow computers down and expose what they are doing, and have students collaboratively build a simulated Internet. Simulations are incredibly powerful pedagogical tools!

But for other material, it's not clear what 3D embodied social simulations bring to the table. Some subjects are difficult to express in simulations. Other subjects may be good targets of simulation, but don't require collaboration among students, so the simulations can be delivered in some other, simpler means. There is a huge design space here, and one size does not fit all.

Last week's Prof. Lopes lecture (from her YouTube channel)

What's your advice for other educators who want to use OpenSim in their classes?

 

It is possible to use OpenSim very effectively in education, but it requires a bit of planning ahead. Don't just assume that students will know what to do, or that they will enjoy it as much as they (the teachers) might do. There needs to be an effort to make things uncomplicated and meaningful, rather than using it just as technology demonstration.

But, more importantly, I would like to make a call of arms for educators and education professionals to embrace simulations as the powerful learning materials that they are. It takes time and resources to make effective simulations, but they can give insights that books and videos simply can't.

 

PROFESSOR LOPES' PREPRATIONS FOR TEACHING IN OPENSIM:

The configuration of Firestorm so that they could login to the class's virtual world: This is always a very complicated process, unfortunately. In order to make it as simple as possible, I recorded a short video explaining the process step by step. I made this activity as the first assignment, and gave them points for it. That seems to have worked like a charm!

 

User accounts: This is usually a huge headache to manage in the context of education and restricted environments. If we open registrations publicly, we may end up with people who shouldn't be there, so there needs to be some sort of institutional authentication mechanism in place. I prepared for this last year: I developed an addon that authenticates valid users of my University. (I also developed one for Gmail accounts, but that wasn't used here) So when I decided to do this course this year, I already had user accounts under control -- only people with UC Irvine IDs can login to this virtual world.

The spatial disorientation: Many people, including young people, are not used to so many degrees of freedom in a computer application. They get into the world and have no idea how to "see" things or where to go. I pointed the students to a couple of Second Life basic tutorials on how to move around and control the camera, but those are not enough; I'm not even sure they watched those videos. I learned how to mitigate this, over the years.

 

For everything that requires focusing on some object, I give them virtual chairs that they sit on and that positions their cameras on exactly the right view. For example, the auditorium for our live lectures has chairs that do the right thing with their cameras; they just need to sit. I did this also for the homework projects that require focusing on some object. The students picked it up pretty intuitively: they see a chair, they know what to do: sit down. Additionally, I placed teleporter objects all around the virtual world that takes them to the two main places they need to go, so that they just point, click, and go, without having to understand how to use the map.

Appearance: The first time they logged in, they were all Ruth [nickname for a default starting avatar - WJA], and many of them were uncomfortable with this. I mitigated this by including a mall where they can go and grab nicer avatars, and even clothes. Similarly to the configuration problems, I recorded a video tutorial on how to change the appearance. That also worked nicely, although from time to time I have to help students who lost their clothes and appear naked, or as a cloud. Luckily, these cases have been few and sparse. And
many students didn't bother to change from Ruth, which is fine too.

The download of Firestorm: People get very confused when they go to the Firestorm site, and usually end up downloading the install for Second Life. A friend of mine (another college professor who is using OpenSim in his classes) had warned me about it. In order to avoid this confusion, I put copies of the right executables on Canvas (the LMS we use), and pointed the students to it instead of Firestorm's web site. That was a trivial thing to do that avoided a major headache.

Comments

[Mint]

Professor Lopes makes a good point about how OpenSim may not be suitable for all coursework, or even all coursework within computer science at large. As an international relations student, I'd have no idea how OpenSims could be adapted for us, besides having everyone go there to sit down for a lecture. But that comes with additional problems, such as how to also embed the powerpoint references our professors often use. All of our projects are still likely to be turned in outside of OpenSim (eg. papers, book reviews, exams) as well, so there's not much interaction possible.

I'd be curious to know what the students in Professor Lopes' class thought about the experience. Did they enjoy it? Would they take another class that used OpenSim? Also, will professors teaching higher-level courses think that students are adequately prepared for their courses after learning primarily on OpenSim rather than on more conventional platforms?

[Gord Holden]

Have used virtual worlds for 13 years to teach DL students, with great success. The platform I used was Active Worlds (which has been around and continually upgraded for 25+ years). It is cheap, simple to use, appropriate for all users, and has an incredibly powerful suite of multimedia applications already built in. No need for ANYTHING else.

[John]

"more conventional platforms" like Zoom?

[Hyacinth Jean Landry]

"OpenSimulator is basically a reverse engineered version of Second Life, with a notoriously difficult UI and old graphics"

Hi! I have been running an OpenSim grid for many years, and I am also one of the developers of an OpenSim branch. OpenSim functions and has the same features as Second Life, plus a lot of unique features like NPC's and LOTS of extra script functions. The UI that you see in Firestorm and other viewers is the same as you would experience in Second Life.

The "graphics" are actually better than anything I can do in SL. We have "Var" regions, which can be any multiple of 256 meters.. So you can make gorgeous landscapes all around you that can actually be built and walked upon (not a sim surround). It's great for things like flying or sailing.

The downside is less people (which may be a good thing haha) and less legally-obtainable content. Luckily our particular grid has some great creators, and we have some really beautiful open source mesh avatars.

OpenSim is a good solution for education projects like this. Or if you want some really big spaces to build in. On most OpenSim grids, you can rent a full region for between ($5 - $30/mo), or run your own from your home PC or an inexpensive cloud server.