Postcards from In World

Thanks for a great meeting today! As a group, we generated a great list of "next steps" in the ongoing design of Budworm.

To the left, you can see the five of us in the center of town.







After some fancy footwork with the keyboards, we all managed to get up on the roof of the BioSeq Building.













A few of us managed to sit on the lab benches, which lead to a discussion about bench height relative to different avatar heights.









The group convened on the third floor to explore the bunk facilities for visiting researchers / consultants. Interesting conversation about the different ways to get our avatars to sit down where and how we want them to sit down (note, sitting on couch and sitting on arm of chair).





There is a conference table on the second floor -- we practiced getting our avatars to sit around the table, like in RL. We discussed how and whether students might use settings like this to carry out group work tasks.

Next steps

From our interaction today, we learned that there are a few things that are needed:

- Road signs, building signs, to help orient people in Budworm
- The students will likely need a "guided tour" their first time in Budworm, so that they can be successful picking things up, finding articles, moving and flying from one building or space to another
- Wendy suggested that students will need to know what and how they can pick objects up - so, the microscope, the slides, the note on the desk beside the computer
- Leslie, minimizing superfluous details (i.e., why is the truck here, can I drive it, what is the relevance to the simulation?)
- Can I sit here? Why or why not?
- Heather, there needs to be concrete, structured tasks for every visit, so "go to the Mayor's office, and do these three things"