The Collaborative Design Project
This collaborative design project aims at exploring an alternative and innovative way of using Second Life for education purposes. As Group A we explored the field of teaching.
What is Second Life?
Second Life, originally developed by Linden Lab, is a downloadable client program which presents a 3D virtual world/immersive space entirely built, maintained and owned by its residents. Since it became available to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and there are more than 4,793,000 subscribers globally (as of 19 March 2007).
The basic idea is that users interact with each other through avatars. Users can socialise, participate in individual or group activities, explore, create and trade virtual properties and services.
Second Life provides a unique potential for those educators interested in distance learning, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), virtual reality/simulation, new media studies, corporate training, etc.
It is possible to use Second Life to enhance learning experience and deepen understanding by allowing individuals practice skills, try new ideas, and more importantly, learn from mistakes they make. A key advantage of such a virtual environment is that educators and students can work together and collaborate wherever they are. Therefore, Second Life is an ideal supplement to a traditional classroom environment for enriching any curriculum.
Project Milestones
The major milestones of this project include: a literature review with regard to Second Life or virtual reality teaching/learning applications; requirements gathering and conceptual design with 16 sets of low fidelity prototypes; finally followed by selecting a prototype and designing it in further detail with personae, scenarios, task analysis, prototype implementation and evaluation.
Prototype Development
The external judgement panel examined all the 16 low fidelity prototypes we developed. The five marking dimensions for evaluating overall value of prototypes include: feasibility, educational value, enjoyability, benefit over real life and benefit over 2D systems.
The Turtle prototype gained one of the highest scores and we chose it for further development as it was feasible to implement and evaluate and also had good educational value.
Among those prototypes awarded the highest scores, the turtle one was picked out since it is outstandingly feasible and rich for additional value in education domain.
The Team
 Stephen Clavering |  Nick Day |
 Andrew Nicols |  Can Zhao |