Digitalkatie's blog

Last class: Shopping, pianos and animations

Today was our last class (awwww!). We have really enjoyed teaching the classes, and it's looked like everyone has enjoyed them. As well as the four people we were teaching, I think another half dozen people dropped in to see what was happening and now have avatars!

We started today with a bit of retail therapy and a trip to GuRLywood - the biggest and best hair shop in Second Life! :-)

Unfortunately the grid started to get a bit iffy so we went to Torley Linden's youtube site and all watched the video on creating your own SL animations. We then attempted to make our own animation, but the version of Qavimator for the Mac is buggy.

We switched to the FreeSound site instead and showed how to download short sound clips and import them into SL. We then made a giant piano with five keys each which all made strange noises. Mine had a trumpet fanfare, a meow, a laugh, a comedy toot toot horn, and an old-fashioned ringing phone.

We had a quick look at editing the land terrain, then Dan and Josephine arrived and we turned to testing streaming and setting up blogging.

We were joined by others at lunchtime, Sheri, Ranney (songwriter and comedien), DJ (the hiphop teacher), as well as a vast quantity of food. We then spent the rest of the afternoon discussing the summer program.

Afterwards we helped tidy up, including opening up all the sealed packaging on the headsets, mice and mousemats for the program. We then headed to the Jerk Hut for some jamaican food with Dan and Josephine before they headed off to the airport.

We've had a fantastic time teaching this class. I'm really going to miss everyone we've been working with, although I'm sure we'll still meet them online in SL! I'm looking forward to keeping an eye on the Kidz Connect island and seeing what they get up to with the kids there this summer.

7th class: Everyone doing different things!

Dan and Josephine were along this evening, but they'd had a long couple of days of meetings. Rachel wasn't along as she was graduating, and Sheri was back having been off since the start of last week. We also had a couple of staff along who would be helping with the program. They worked through induction island.

Crystal and Leslie played with making sculpted prims using Plopp SL. Crystal then did some shopping and Leslie worked on setting up the Kidz Connect blog. Sheri tried doing some building and textures.

6th class: Hide and Seek and Sculptees

On Tuesday we had asked everyone to come to class on Wednesday with a question or something they weren't sure about and want to cover more.

After writing a list we played a warmup game to practise camera controls, finding a hidden prim then IMing me after seeing the colour on the opposite side of the prim.

We looked at putting photos and links into notecards. We talked about ways to promote events in the teen grid and giving gifts and prizes to other avatars.

During the class Wendy dropped in to say Hi. She brought us a cassette tape of white noise that she made and used to sell to parents of babies with colic. We tried it out as Louis was lying about playing on the floor. It was kinda surreal teaching while there was the sound of a tumble dryer in the background!

For the last section of the class we looked at sculpted prims (or sculptees) using the fruit textures provided free in SL. Leslie made a very funky spinning apple with a picture of her avatar on it.

5th class: Scripting rocks and twirling blobs

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.

4th class: Building: It all starts with a prim!

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 cairs 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!

3rd class: Dominoes and Fieldtrips

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 Kids Connect island on the teen grid, and while we were there we met Kadishuu, one of the kids from Kids Connect two years ago!

2nd class: flying, appearance and photos

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.  We had a quick look at camera controls and taking snapshots, then sent photos from Second Life to Flickr.

Kids Connect SL training: First class

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 Kids 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.

Holiday!!

We're off on holiday!! We're in Tampa, Florida for two weeks then New York for one week.  In Tampa we will be helping out with the Second Life part of a Kids Connect program that will be running in the summer.  We are training the teachers who will be running the program in how to use SL with the kids. 

If you want to find out more about Louis' adventures in Americaland, go to Digitallouis' blog :-)

Puzzle

Do you remember those puzzles, the ones where you have to get a fox, chicken and some grain across the river? I used to have to solve them when studying AI at school. The new version of this is Baby, Carseat and Pram, where you have to get everything from the flat into the car, which is parked at my parent's flat. The car is too far away to carry the baby in the carseat, you can't push the pram and carry the carseat, you can't have the baby in the car without a carseat, and you can't leave the baby alone in the flat. Solution: clip the carseat onto the handlebar of the pram!