The Continuing Story of Uru in Schools: Further Research on The Use of Virtual Worlds in Education By Dr. William F. Schmachtenberg (aka) Dae Miami (SL)
During the 2011 to 2012 school year, I received permission from Franklin County Public Schools in Southwest Virginia to conduct research on the effectiveness of using the virtual world software Uru by Cyan Worlds Inc. Cyan gave me permission as well to conduct the research. The results were presented at the online VWBPE (Virtual Worlds: Best Practices In Education) Conference in Second Life during the spring of 2012 and are presented in the accompanying article. Three other papers were released and can be downloaded for free at : https://sites.google.com/a/frco.k12.va.us/williamschmachtenberg/resources. At the VWBPE conference, educators expressed that although they liked Uru and its possible uses in the classroom; it was difficult to load on computers and could not be run at all on a mac. They convinced me to port my content to the Unity 3D game engine. Unity 3d is a more modern game engine that allows content to be ported to pcs, macs, and even run in a web browser for free. I started to create content during the summer of 2012 and encouraged my students to create in Unity 3D as well during the 2012 to 2013 school year. One freshman at my high school created a volcano world and then a forest world. Kristen Leary created an oceanography world with a whale and submarine. The program is designed to help students review seafloor features such as mid-ocean ridges, trenches, and rift valleys. [See Interview with Kristen Leary in this issue of VEJ.] Kristen Leary, a senior at Franklin County High School, demonstrates an oceanography program she created in Unity 3D. The inset shows a screen capture of her program. 139