Teachers teaching in Second Life might need to have at least some building and skripting skills (to design learning space, create or manipulate tools, etc.). In order to further develop these skill, we are asked to build a tree. Other objectives of this activity are:

• to cooperate in a community project
• to experience and develop master-apprenticeship model and other forms of peer to peer support
• to explore informal learning opportunities in-world

My building and scripting skills are still very basic and although I haven’t needed more sophisticated skills for my lessons so far, I do want to improve them. 

My tree

I tweeted about this assignment on Twitter in the hope to find others to help me brainstorm what kind of tree to build. Carol Rainbow replied and had some good suggestions. In the end, I decided to make an ice tree fitting the season 🙂 What I knew from the beginning is that I wanted to make my tree do something and not just a tree to be looked at. Again, because of the season and because of the ice tree, I decided it should recite a snow poem. It would be the first time for me to create the necessary sound files to upload to Second Life.

I started building some crystals for “leaves” and was looking for a tree trunk that I could use. I wanted to change the texture to something that looked icy. Then, Carol joined me and she found a leafless, snow-covered tree in her inventory which was luckily modifiable and transferrable. I made several copies in different sizes of my crystal and attached them to the branches of the tree. I also added a snow emitter so that it snows.

Meanwhile, I had given up on finding a good snow poem and decided it should be a winter song instead but I didn’t know how to overcome the 10-second limit (sound files uploaded to SL need to be under 10 seconds). I don’t have the rights to stream sound on the MUVEnation sim. Carol made my day by telling me about Psyke’s Music script that connects 9-second long sound files to a continuous sound. I was thrilled not only because this solved my song problem but also because this would be extremely useful for creating objects for my language lessons. I found a free version of my song, a very popular German song about a snow flake, Schneeflöckchen.

The only drawback that the script has is that all the sound files need to be exactly 9 seconds long. I’m sure there is an easy (automatic) way of splitting a longer sound file into 9-second bits but I haven’t worked much with sound files, yet so that this took me ages. I uploaded my six 9-second sound files and dragged them onto my tree together with the script. Carol also showed me what to do to have the cursor turn into a hand indicating that this object does something when clicked on (write “Touch to play music” into the description field of the object in edit mode). So, now, I had an ice tree that snowed and played a song when clicked on 🙂 Thank you for all your help, Carol!

Some days later, I felt like I didn’t really build a tree and wanted to create a second version from scratch. I used the same ice crystal and coloured them. The script is the same, too.

My main problem when building is that aligning objects takes me incredibly long although I use camera control to look at my object from all angles and zoom in on my objects. I know I can use the grid but that wouldn’t help with objects like my tree. Whenever I added a crystal and thought it was positioned correctly on a branch and I looked at it from another angle, I saw that it was not where it should be at all. Another issue with this tree is that the number of prims I used is very high, which is something that good builders always try to avoid. Therefore, I am looking forward to the master builder session on the MUVEnation island which will take place soon.

My trees and all the other trees built for this activity are located on the MUVEnation island (temporarily).