In my first post about holodecks, I mentioned some ideas how holodecks could be used for language learning. Meanwhile I had time to create a scene with the Horizons holodeck. In our last SLExperiments meeting, we sat in my holodeck living room I have created and brainstormed some ideas. Here is what we came up with (some ideas depend on the permissions settings which we still have to find out about):

• Describe a scene students are in
• Give a description of a scene to students (notecard?) and they build it in groups. Then, compare and talk about the differences
• Students build scenes collaboratively (or alone), then describe why they built it that way, etc.
• Instead of describing a scene, give students a description of a situation or a dialogue and have students build the scene which will then be used as to role-play the dialogue/situation.

Building scenes might sound difficult but the advantage of holodecks and the Builder’s Buddy script (see below) is that very basic building skills are sufficient. Students or teachers can use objects that are available as freebies (permissions need to be at least copy/modify) and don’t need to build anything from scratch.

A snapshot of my living room scene:

And here is a short video that shows how the scene is made to appear when needed:

A good alternative to commercial holodecks is the free Builder’s Buddy script. In my first post about holodecks, you can see pictures and watch a video of a scene that I created with the BB script. Should it turn out that it is not possible to build collaboratively with a commerical holodeck or the class has no money at all to invest in (a) holodeck(s), students can all be given the BB script.

Scenes like the living room or the worshop setting are not the only situation that you can use the BB script. Anything from complex building to simple creations (like in the following video) can be built.

When several prims that contain different scripts are linked only the scripts in the last object will be recognized. In such cases, instead of linking them, the BB script can be used

Another advantage of the BB script is that several scenes can be nested. If you are, for example, giving a presentation and you want to reveal  the “scene” step-by-step, this can be done relatively easily. The most important thing to remember here is to use different channels for the nested scenes.

—> Link to all blog posts related to holodecks, Builder’s Buddy and language teaching ideas.