Back from Chicago and the Second Life Community Convention. Had a great time even if everything didn’t quite go to plan… I’m going to try and focus on the big picture in this post, expect more detail to follow.
Still struggling with how best to get across to students that programming isn’t hard, it just takes time and active practice to master (and needing ways to set them up for success, rather than creating a culture of failure). Via Bill Kerr’s blog, Mark Guzdial has some evidence that the digital natives really don’t want to have to learn how to program. To the extent that they’ll consider dropping a required class to avoid it.
… even (or should that be especially) when its your students’ work, not your own.
As part of the work my own students did last semester in Second Life, one group produced an interactive display allowing maps, 3D objects and supporting text to be combined. I just found their item reviewed here.
In practical terms, the students did this because the land we had in Second Life for our project didn’t allow them to display all of their items at once - but it could be useful to others if I can release polished and re-usable code.
Sadly, the url (SLurl) in the article no longer applies - the project being over - and there currently isn’t a copy of the item in-world anywhere. I’ll try and rectify that soon-ish.
And it was work too… but yesterday I found myself exploring five different virtual worlds.
