• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

The learning power of a virtual world

August 18, 2010 By Anne 2 Comments

It’s definitely not a flashy video production, but if you’re interested in learning about a virtual world that 6.4 million kids aged 8-15 (68% girls, average age 12.5) like because it challenges them in math and science and expects them to be smart, watch this interview about Whyville.net at Discover magazine. Founder and CEO of Whyville parent Numedeon Inc., Jim Bower – who is also a professor of computational neuroscience at the University of Texas, San Antonio – says he started Whyville because he’s been interested in improving education since he was 14, and a virtual world was a way for both kids and community creators to explore how to do science in fun but serious ways (through simulation and community).

“We integrate community with learning just like a good 3rd-grade teacher does,” he says. This is something I’d like more and more parents and educators to see: that the sense of community teachers create and nurture in classroom activity involving social media (virtual worlds, wikis, blogs, etc.) is the same sense of community they’ve always fostered. This sense of community includes the social norms (citizenship) and critical thinking about information and behavior (new media literacy) that mitigate antisocial behavior (e.g., bullying and cyberbullying) – in addition to learning about and interaction with the content (examples below). A lot is accomplished by folding new media like virtual worlds into classroom community: learning, increased student engagement, opportunities to practice good citizenship and media literacy, and – from an online safety perspective – lasting protection for social media users (because aggressive behavior increases risk, respect and civility mitigate it – see “Digital risk, digital citizenship”).

Relevance more than escapism engages

A key point in the 16-min. interview is where Bower says that the real power of virtual worlds is not escapism but its relevance to the real world. Kids can use virtual worlds to understand and interact with the real world better. A nutrition project has led to parents emailing Whyville that their kids are now insisting on going to the grocery store with their parents so they can read the product labels, Bower says. In-world population growth is leading to “red tide” – virtual algae blooms – in the Whyville Lagoon, a problem users have to fix as they work the problem of population growth. The newest project concerns the Whyville power grid. “The power grid’s a mess,” Bower says – hacked together, fragile, and unable to support the growing population. “In the new energy project, kids can monitor the power grid. Then we’re going to have a brown out. The kids will have to figure out what’s wrong, then in the second phase, they’ll design a new community from the ground up, making political decisions about sources of energy, home efficiency, new smart grid technology, and so on.” They’ll build various solutions themselves “basically in competition with each other,” Bower says, adding that the funding for the project includes the development of 15 curriculum units linked to Texas’s 8th-grade career education mandate.

Related links

  • Virtual gardens, real nutrition: Wisconsin-based virtual world KidsCom.com this year teamed up with Michigan State University’s Mich. Nutrition Network and the 4-H Children’s Garden at the university to teach kids about nutrition and gardening and “fight childhood obesity” by enabling young users to create their own virtual gardens in-world, VirtualWorldsNews reported. Soon users will be able to harvest their virtual produce “to follow USDA-approved recipes to make “healthy meals online and at home.”
  • VWs for student engagement: A new study in Britain found that tech lessons in UK schools “are so dull they are putting pupils off the subject and careers in computing, [threatening future economic health], top scientists warn,” the BBC reports. I can see the importance of teaching computing in school, but what about 1) using computing to teach everything from social studies to citizenship (and make it all as engaging as do virtual worlds like Whyville, Kidscom.com, and QuestAtlantis) and 2) using online games and virtual worlds to teach computing, programming, and game design (see MIT’s Scratch)?
  • Other experts in Discover: Along with the interview with Whyville’s Jim Bower mentioned above, Discover magazine has a 16.5 min. interview with Lucy Bradshaw, who headed the team at Electronic Arts that developed the game Spore, and a 6 min. interview with Prof. Tiffany Barnes about her Game2Learn computer science project at University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
  • “The 8 highest ranked colleges for game design” at GamePro.com
  • “The power of play: Cyberbullying solution?”
  • “From chalk ‘n’ talk to learning by doing”
  • “Videogames’ mental health benefits researched”
  • “WoW: The guild effect for teachers”
  • “World of Warcraft: MMORPGs in school”
  • ConnectSafely.org’s virtual world safety tips for parents of kids and teens
Share Button

Filed Under: Social Media, videogames, virtual worlds Tagged With: Jim Bower, Kidscom, Lucy Bradshaw, QuestAtlantis, Tiffany Barnes, virtual worlds, Whyville

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Can this be played in school? Please? | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    February 25, 2011 at 10:52 pm

    […] “The learning power of a virtual world” […]

    Reply
  2. Tweets that mention The learning power of a virtual world | NetFamilyNews.org -- Topsy.com says:
    August 18, 2010 at 7:14 pm

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by annecollier, Izzy Neis and Ricardo Lucas, betterverse. betterverse said: RT @annecollier: New blog post: The learning power of a virtual world http://nfn.wpengine.com/?p=29338 (via @IzzyNeis) […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Subscribe to my
RSS feed
Follow me on Twitter or even better:
NEW: Follow me on MASTODON!
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • A solution for ‘awful but lawful’
  • New global service for getting nudes off the Internet
  • Then there’s the flip side of ChatGPT
  • For SID 2023: What youth want ‘online safety’ to teach
  • ChatGPT for media literacy training
  • Future safety: Content moderators and digital grassroots justice
  • Mental health 2023, Part 1: Youth on algorithms
  • Where did my Twitter go? And other end-of-2022 notes

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for tweets, posts on our Facebook page, and key commentaries from Anne on her page at Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2023 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.