But what do they learn?

On Friday the administrators who bought the SL island with the departmental credit card came to see what it looks like. They were a bit worried because they had been watching the CSI episode in which somone is murdered in SL. ( I don't mean they were officially worried or disapproving, just curious and wanting to find out more).  My mission was to reassure them that the students were doing nice innocent projects and that they were learning something in the process.  That was easy enough - I just showed them the elephant and the family of rubber duckies and they were delighted. Some of the students explained what they were working on, and I explained what new skills they had and they went away happy.

Later in the day my colleague in the office next door came by when I was running a SL tutorial. She teaches respectable Java programming and is a nice no-nonsense lady with grown up sons not that much younger than me. Sometimes I suspect she thinks I am a bit odd. :-) She watched in interest for a while, then asked "but what do they learn?" This, of course, is a very good question.

I have a marking scheme for what they are being assessed on ( Download Marking_scheme_for_MM_PortfolioMScStudents2008.doc ) but given they haven't submitted their portfolios, I can't say what proportion of them will achieve what. The best I can do at the moment is bring up a couple of case studies based on objects on the island, observations and student learning logs.

Case 1: the elephant (as pictured above). This elephant belongs in a circus section of the island. Avatars can sit on him and ride around. To achieve this, the student had to build the elephant out of geometric objects (prims), involving some quite complicated distortion of the objects (path cuts etc). He then linked them together. The script requires the following concepts: accessing control of the avatar's movement, handling user control events (like left and right arrow keys) and driving the motion of linked objects (the legs) from the main script.

Case 2: Noughts and crosses.

One of the groups is doing a games arcade. They have a whack-a-mole game, noughts and crosses and hang man (which explains why I once was disturbed to see a block man dangling from gallows on the island. :-) ) To do noughts and crosses, the student made the simple prims you see in the picture, but the harder bit is scripting it. There is an example in the book which he started with but eventually ditched to do things a better way. Once again, you need to control linked objects via a main control script. In this group, they decided that a user should have a running score based on their success at all the games in the area, so they wanted some kind of persistent high score table. To do this, they learned how to get Linden script to communicate with an online data they made using php. Now this is pretty impressive because they realised they needed a feature, they researched how to do it, they used their existing skills from previous modules and they learned new technical skills on their own initiative. All in the interest of linking their own work to their group members. One of the students has also been applying knowledge from his fourth year project where he is making games.

In a way, this is not that suprising in the sense that this is the kind of skill level we would expect from 4th year students. It's the kind of thing employers would expect them to do. But it illustrates that there is scope for an appropriate computer science learning within Second Life. Which, I guess, is what my colleague was asking.

Not all of the students are capabale of this, of course. They have very mixed technical backgrounds, so although they ought to know how to program already, I have had to revise quite a lot of scripting concepts for the people who are trailing behind. (No doubt to the frustration of the students who are good at programming). This isn't because we are using Second Life, though, as I have had the same experience with Java teaching.

Comments

[Yishay Mor]

Diana Carr had recently run a great seminar @ LKL on learning in SL.

have a look at:
http://learningfromsocialworlds.wordpress.com/category/february-7th-discussion-event/

[Nicole Cargill-Kipar]

Incidentally, I read the elephant-student's blog today and was really rather impressed with the attention to detail and the lengthy reflection.

There were several others that were very interesting and in-depth, too. Seems the blog tool is doing what it should.