Too much homework!

Struggling a little to find time for everyone to get on TSL. Lately, everyone has had too much homework! One of our girls finally wanted to try, but she's been overloaded with math (figuring compound interest of all things!). I hoping that next week, the week before winter break, will be a good week to get some TSL work done. Ed's been teaching the boys to program skateboards and vehicles. After watching some of the girls at EdBoost enjoying Internet programs where they get to play with outfits (essentially online paper dolls), Ed's gotten to work learning how to program fancy clothing!

Claudia tells us that we will soon have company on the island (a group of students from Minnesota and maybe another group from Peru (I think) -- should be fun! More later...

My life in second life

Second life is one of the best things to do on a Friday, the building the scripting is great. The things I like in this program is the scripting with a good script will take you a long way for programming vehicles and objects that can pass the limit.

Nate,

Building and scripting

Hargall and Sin have been building amazing things, including an SL EdBoost that is getting more and more realistic. It's really a nice space now, and reminds me that the RL EdBoost is a nice space too! The SL version has much higher ceilings (the ceiling of the building is so high that it's way out of sight, and even when you try to fly up to it, it takes serious work to get there!). We are collecting a few "books" of useful things for scripts in the SL EdBoost computer lab.

Besides that towering building, we have some long low ones. One of them is partly wallpapered with sunsets and has some other nice blue and green materials, so it's a nice place to be and to work too.

We are all getting better at scripting. Hargall realized that he could put his knock knock joke script, and a music script too, into his hat. And Sin put a Foo Fighters looping script into his hat, so now when these guys have their hats on they are noisy! Totally under control now: copying scripts into objects and making small modifications. Beginning: complete understanding of the first scripts; figuring out what to do when debugging is needed; figuring out how to set the permissions (share with group, allow copy/modify/transfer) so that Hector and Tiplife can provide advice and keep track of progress. We practiced with sounds and music this week, and will do images next week, but these guys are looking forward to vehicles, animations, and programs that build things!

Issues/wishes:

• We have quite a lot of this is "litter" that could be cleaned up, but we have not decided how to do that. E.g. we want to return the extra motorcycles but leave our structures untouched.
  

• We have not been able to set a "media texture" or a parcel music URL (these are in "About Land", clicking on the region name at the top of the screen).
  

We have a couple more students coming through the orientation to join us too! That will be fun. I think they will probably catch up with the rest of us quickly.

First Improptu Meeting

Our first SL meeting...
Improptu and rather chaotic, but fun! If only you could see how many things are moving on this page -- not to mention Chestnuts flaming green outfit!

One step closer...

Claudia tells me that our parcel of land is ready to go. Ed says he visited and that it's still "locked" but that it looks good. I just managed to get there myself... how strange to walk through a dark isolated island all by myself (see pic).

Our patch of land is on the SE corner and I love the openess... but I'm looking forward to how the kids will build it up as well!

So far, we have managed to get two kids through the sign-up process (some technical difficulties for one student but we've finally overcome them). For Chestnut Breck, it was a new experience just making an email account! I hope I can get their first blog posts tomorrow and then start the class this week? Next week at the latest...

We've been practicing

I signed on to Second Life as Hector Something, started exploring and scripting, and got an email address to go with the new name: Hector.Something@gmail.com.

We almost have liftoff

Check out the "postcard" we got from Claudia Linden today -- she's standing on what will soon be EdBoost's plot on the Campus: TSL island. It's pretty exciting -- EdBoost has never had land to develop before, much less oceanside property.

How did we get here? It's sort of a long story but I'll try to keep it short...

Two summers ago, Ed (mostly) and I (learning as we went along) put together an intro computer programming class for middle school students. The schedule was awkward and so enrollment was low but the students who came learned quite a lot about programming with Python (the language we used). We looked forward to hosting more classes and we knew that for future classes we'd need to find a way to give the kids lots of access to the computers so that they could practice. But, the summer class format was such disaster, and scheduling was so hard, I let this past summer come and go without a computer class.

Enter Hargall Orbit (his TSL name), one of our Homework and School Project Assistance (HASPA) students. He's obessessed with Second Life and talks about it all the time. I finally had to check it out, just to see what he's so interested in. And it's true -- it's fascinating. A whole world -- online. I had never seen anything like it (admittedly, I'm not very well versed in these things). Apropos of nothing, Hargall asks me if I know anyone who can teach him to "script." Apparently Second Life (SL) allows you to make objects (anything from a new t-shirt, to a new motorcycle, to a new house) and if you can program in the SL language (Wiki LSL) you can make anything (you can also buy anything, but why buy things when you can make them yourself?). I forwarded the query to Ed, our computer expert, and he was soon hooked too.

From there, we contacted Claudia Linden, SL's resident education person. I was interested in using SL as a platform for teaching this student and his HASPA-mates how to do computer programming (the kids are here all afternoon -- no schedule problems and unlimited time to practice!), but EdBoost has a firm policy of NOT allowing students on sites where they can "chat" with strangers. Claudia had a solution! She told us that we could get space on educator's island and restrict access to EdBoost folks. She also invited us to submit a proposal to try out the Campus: TSL program free for the duration of our initial class (a considerable donation!).

And just today, we found out that we will a parcel of land to use for our class (see picture-- and there's Claudia, our SL helper!).

So, here I am, setting up my first blog as well. We're going to try to chronicle this experience -- and get the kids to post their opinions and experiences as well! Keep reading!