Learning Activities in Second Life

What makes SL a great educational environment is the ability for learners to collaborate on projects that keep them motivated, focused and engaged. Learners in Second Life create objects that are related to their studies. They can build a whole landscape that includes building and furniture.

In fact, resident of SL have built several museums, some of them replicate real life museums like Dresden Museum in Germany (Baker, Wentz & Woods, 2009).

Moreover, students at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, have created several 3D objects in SL in their multimedia programming class. “They designed floating giant cocktail jugs… a giant interactive guitar that animated avatars… dragonflies that avatars could ride… and a platform that transported avatars between the different levels”(Cargill-Kipar, 2009, p. 540).

These students had the opportunity to learn programming languages; collaborate on building objects; negotiate landscape sharing with their neighbors; and manage the limit number of prims (basic building blocks) allowed to use in their design (Cargill-Kipar, 2009).

Creating 3D Objects for Second Life Tutorials