The Game Learner

Screenshots of a room I created in around an hour in Just Leap In – visit it at http://www.justleapin.com/shares/9299:7CWxWoP4

It’s as close as I’ve been able to get to a hospital ward with the available furniture and objects. The ability to import your own models is on the list of features to come.

The boxes in the top image appear as the room is loading – rather cute really.

It’s in Beta at the moment and I haven’t taken a huge look around but it is incredibly easy to use and the list of features to come is really impressive. I’ve been in touch with the developers and they seem very switched on and friendly.

I’ll post more about it when I’ve had a chance to play more.

I’ve also been able to embed the world in my other blog (edublogs is a little paranoid about embeddable content) – check it out at http://couchmedia.blogspot.com/2008/12/just-leap-in-diy-virtual-space.html

We’re working on a pretty cool project at CIT now – developing models, practices and standards for using virtual worlds in the classroom, with a particular focus on the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector.

We are using Croquet, an open source platform which has been created with education in mind and hope to make effective use of the possibilities that game environments have to offer. We’ll be making a concerted push away from building 3D classrooms, which is a fine first step. I’m quite interested in drawing on the work of Fuchs and Eckermann, creators of Expositur (which I’ve mentioned here before) to make the most of the space that we will be developing.

This is the general Croquet promotional video which shows how awesome this can potentially be.

If you’re interested in finding out more or contributing, let me know and we’ll see what we can do.

Croquet is an open source virtual world system (like Second Life) that is rapidly growing in popularity among educators for its extra functionality and ease of use.

The Croquet team at the University of Minnesota are currently putting together a very interesting project as a teaching tool for Spanish Language Pragmatics, which they have called Croquelandia. As you can see, it allows learners to explore a space and interact with other students (and native Spanish speakers) in Spanish. The conversational options that are selected (in this case with a non-player character) determine how the conversation proceeds.

(Click image to watch YouTube video.)

Very nifty.