Apr 22

Holodecks and language learning

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.

Jan 01

Building a tree

 muvenation logoTeachers 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.
Blue singing tree
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.
Ice Tree
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).