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:
Text-Based Viewer for Second Life & OpenSim? There's an App for That
Linden Lab may be finally ready to release an iOS "companion" app for Second Life, but reader "Saga" points out there's already a third party SL app in the App Store: "There is another app for SL chat/inventory for iOS. I use it now and then, it’s called MetaChat!" And so there is:
So about the same feature list as the late-lamented Pocket Metaverse, but updated more often (check the developer blog here). But caveat emptor, my dude: MetaChat's user reviewers are pretty middling. However, even most of the critical reviews still suggest it's worth considering as a purchase:
Continue reading "Text-Based Viewer for Second Life & OpenSim? There's an App for That" »
Posted on Monday, January 14, 2019 at 02:44 PM in Comment of the Week, Open Sim, Open Source/Reverse Engineer, SL viewer news | Permalink | Comments (0)
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