This two-year study reveals the evolution of an experimental workshop of teaching and learning on the Open Sim virtual world, hosted by the University of British Columbia. Using participatory action research methods including pre and post questionnaires, participant observation, informal note taking and interviewing, and visual analysis, this researcher tracks student participants’ learning how to navigate, make 3-D “sculptie” desert creatures and nests, and write pop-up reflective poems, featured at my Desert Hive. The workshop each year at my local tech charter, Soronan Desert School, consisted of six volunteer students, three repeaters, engaged in a four-day session for three hours a day in the month of May. One of the male students became key informant and teaching assistant. Despite technical dreads, such as short time, Internet problems, lost creations, and linking forms, students learned about design elements, 3-D modeling, experiment with lighting and wind animation, and to persist and problem solve. Some of the technical solutions involved uploading animal drawings and cutout faces to save time.
At the same time, the interdisciplinary theme of predator and prey emerged. I encouraged students to “Ask the Biologist” [website] about desert problems, as a result they wrote their class poem Night Nests with Pests. Using the OpenSim, “The arts [can] teach people about empathy, which is one of our greatest civilizing capacities … A culture’s artistic expressions communicate its human essence” (Xxxxx, 2009, 2005). Community participants, as well as students, can construct a virtual world, build architectural forms, and link avatar participants, to explore life problems like solving global pest problems and even malnutrition: A belly full of bugs.
Attendees will receive the unit plan, art & science standards and rubrics, website links, and simple steps on how to start their own site on the OpenSim or Sim-on-a-stick and how to build 3-D creatures that I will demonstrate.
What began as a joke about desert pests, ended in community learning about the importance of pests in an ecosystem as a complex web of interconnected and dependent ingredients. Pests serve as a “warning” sign and need to be accommodated. Virtual world gamification is not mere playing around (Russ, 1993). One person’s pest is another person’s pleasure. As the instructor, I tried to push students to realize that ecological creativity is a striving experience to get along and pests are change agents. Creativity is a challenging process of problem solving and thinking differently, students learned. Their installation was a way of linking forms and linking ideas (Marshall, 2005) and world making (Goodman, 1978). Besides learning three-dimensional modeling tools and features, we learned to be problem-solvers and “imaginators.”
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