Kidz Connect

Start of the second week and we’re doing well. We’ve still got lots of tasks and games we can do, but we’re ahead of where we thought we’d be.

Today we started scripting. We now know how to make a prim look pretty but now we’ll look at how to make it d things. We first looked at how to make a prim ’say’ something (how to put text on the screen), so we made pet rocks that said “Rock on”, “I’m a little rough around the edges” and “I want to be a shiny, spining rock”

We then looked at playing sounds when you click the pet rocks. We were using the sounds already in SL so there were lots of whistle, kiss and ‘hey’ noises round the room.

We headed to Yadni’s freebie yard to get a collection of free sounds as well as the many other free delights at Yadni’s. I also set up a Freesounds account the group can use to import creative commons sound clips into SL.

Our last task of the day was to get an object spinning using a rotate script from the Scripting Help wiki. Soon we had multicoloured cubes and glowing flexi-prim blobs spinning around. Josephine and Dan logged on and said hi as we were finishing up, which was cool. They’ll be joining us for the last couple of sessions this week.

Today we had a full day session so we started looking at building. First of all we ‘rezzed’ a cube and looked at moving, rotating and resizing. We tried different shapes and changing the colour and texture, hollow and path cut before our first challenge of the day: make a chair. It was great that no-one went for a conventional chair, instead we got space sofas and beanbags.

We then looked at flexi-prims, glow and light, twist and taper, then tried another challenge - making a hat.

At lunchtime we headed for some Caribbean food at the Jerk Hut where we met up with Ilene and Joe, a couple of Second Lifers from the University of South Florida in Tampa. It was great for the teachers who are fairly new to SL to meet people who have been using SL in education for a while.

After lunch we looked at repeat rates on textures using a brick wall as an example. We then set our final challenge of the day - to make a learning space. We asked them to think beyond a classroom with chairs facing a blackboard and, after discussions about giant boomboxes, there was a plan to make a giant body. We set up three platforms and then the head, torso and legs were created, all facing a different way!

Friday night we started by exploring the library in the inventory (the INN-ventory not the inVENTory ;-). We pulled out parrots and rugs and lamps and rocket launchers, then played with the beach balls and dominoes. This gave more practice in camera controls. We also looked at shift-drag to copy dominoes and shift-click to select multiple objects, which meant Rachel very quickly filled the sandbox with hundreds of dominoes!

We then mastered the delete function by tidying up the sandbox. The next task was loking at profiles and starting to add to our own profile information. We took photos of ourselves in SL, and Crystal took pictures of our RL selves too.

We then went on a virtual fieldtrip to The Port, Angrybeth Shortbread’s fantastic art gallery of scripted objects. There is a kind of SL Garageband, a wishing well, a zoetropp, and some objects that play about with the avatar ‘keys’ - a unique set of numbers and letters that each avatar has.

At the end of the class we had a quick look at the Kidz Connect island on the teen grid, and while we were there we met Kadishuu, one of the kids from Kidz Connect two years ago!

Today’s class seemed to go well. We introduced how to fly (more difficult on a Mac than a PC) then had a flying through hoops race.

We chatted about chatting. We covered IM and group chats as well, and discussed the difficulties of communicating in the teen grid. We set up a group for the teachers too, Kids Connect Tampa.

We then started to look at appearance. We used an Incredibles poster and played at trying to change our appearance into one of the characters. While the teachers were doing this I set up a Flickr account for the group. [Ed. note: now we have a Flickr group]. We had a quick look at camera controls and taking snapshots, then sent photos from Second Life to Flickr.

We had a really great first class yesterday. Despite confusions about starting times and problems with the wireless network stopping us using SL for a while, everyone enjoyed themselves. We found out at the end the wireless network we used actually belongs to the hotel across the road!

We spent a while getting to know everyone and chatting about the format of the Kidz Connect summer program. I explained about the skills we would be teaching them over the two weeks. When we finally got logged in, Sean chatted to Buridan Simon about using land in the Kula 4 sim while we’re in the main grid. There is a nice plot of land there where we then congregated and ‘met up’ I made sets of slalom poles, one different coloured set for each teacher, and we then had a walking/running race to practice movements skills. On Wednesday we’ll do something similar but flying in the air through hoops.