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Second Life as a Virtual Lab Environment

2013; Springer Nature; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-1-4614-6286-6_7

2197-7968

Dennis Maciuszek, Alke Martens, Ulrike Lucke, Raphael Zender, Thomas Keil,

Usability and User Interface Design

This chapter discusses the potential of using virtual worlds for inquiry-based teaching of science and engineering topics, particularly in the form of interactive experiments. It draws on experiences with a virtual lab for learning cognitive modelling and applied artificial intelligence (AI) in a university setting, realised within Linden Lab’s multi-user virtual environment Second Life (SL). The main observation was that the students, although experienced programmers, had a tough start in making use of the environment, particularly the Linden scripting language (LSL), which they experienced as cumbersome. Yet, in the end they put up with the difficulties and created an inventive AI-based game that exploited the physics engine of Second Life and the support for implementing agents in LSL. We conclude that virtual worlds are in fact useful for creating virtual lab environments, even though Second Life in particular is perceived as lacking ease of use.