Students were introduced to Teen Second Life in our Skoolaborate Island. The initial challenge for students (year 9 -14/15 year olds) is to learn about creating their avatar. They never have any major issue working the basic navigation controls, and soon figure out how to adjust the body shape of their avatar.
They do however, want to loose the n00b jeans and t-shirt, so to do this they have to learn about textures. Second Life uses TARGA files, which are a bitmap format image. In order to create ‘clothes’, students were pointed at the various tutorials and templates that are available online to learn how a flat image is mapped to a 3D mesh.
We use Photoshop CS3 as a year group suite of applications. PSD is a huge leap forward from their ‘paint’ experiences, so it takes some time for them to learn about
- Creating a blank canvas
- Opening a clothing template
- How PSD uses layers to ‘build’ up a composite image
- Importing an image from the internet and applying to their template
- Creating new layers and manipulating images over their ‘mesh’
- How to interpret a 3D mesh in a 2D application (matching seams, joining, contouring)
- How to create an ‘alpha channel’ in PSD
- How ‘masks’ are used to create transparency
- Understanding RGB ‘channels’ – how they build up to form colour
- Creating an alpha channel in PSD to create transparency (short sleeves)
- Saving a file in Targa (.tga) format – 24 bit vs 32 bit images
- Uploading a file and previewing it in SL
- Adding the teacher as a friend – in order to get L$10 (the cost per texture upload)
- How to create a user defined ’shirt’ in SL
- How to ‘wear’ clothes – shirt
- How to locate the uploaded texture
- How to apply the texture to the ’shirt’
- Adjusting the texture and avatar mesh
- Taking a ’screen shot’ using the SL Client
- Downloading to local hard drive
- Cropping image and preparing for email
- Using school email system to attach images to a message and delivering to the teacher
From the outside ‘non’ technical staff member, a group of 30 students wandering around Skoolaborate looks like ‘playing a game’ when in fact they are developing some very complex image manipulation skills. Skoolaborate is MY project, and initially not a ’school’ project as such (see previous posts).
Other teachers are involved in the staffing of the class, but to date are not attempting to engage in the student’s learning. I think that SL is a challenge in this regard, so next term, I am going to make a bigger effort not to personally attend the classes in RL, but in SL. This will at least encourage them to observe what the students are doing. Right now it is called a ’special project’, which I do not like as it de-values its importance. If nothing else the above skills are core-digital-media skills and Skoolaborate can be seen as a motivation vehicle.
Now they have some 20 hours experience in ‘digital media’, next term we will address how we can use the virtual world to deliver a more structured unit of work. Discussions are being held to extend our use of Second Life as a project based learning ‘presentation’ vector, so in some ways, this group will become key informtion czars when we expand it’s use.
If you are interested in Skoolaborate, visit the website and perhaps attend one of our fortnightly FlashMeetings.
Images created by students ://
I’m not so sure the a ’special project’ isn’t a good thing – gives you scope to be more flexible and raise the bar even higher! Think your list is a great help for those other’s of us who are venturing ‘in world’ WITH our students. Thanks for continuing to be our champion.