Posts tagged Education 
MIT developing educational MMO funded by Gates Foundation
Is gaming the answer to the math- and science-related apathy plaguing American school kids? Some folks at MIT think so, and a new press blurb outlines how the institute is developing an MMO designed to further science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. "In contrast to the way ...
Minecraft guild creates massive world to help educate children
Yes, I know that Minecraft isn't technically an MMO, but with multiplayer servers, you can have up to 999 players connected simultaneously in the same space, which is ironically more than many MMOs. But I digress! Massively Minecraft (no relation) is a community of Minecraft players dedicated ...
Astronaut: Moon, Mars, and Beyond developer talks educational mission
Astronaut: Moon, Mars, and Beyond has been in the news a lot lately, but just who are the folks behind the educational MMO from NASA and Project Whitecard? A new piece at Gamasutra sheds a bit of light on that as well as a few more details about the project as a whole. "I'm originally a ...
The Virtual Whirl: The secret sauce
Virtual environments evince a significant lack of mainstream adoption. Relatively tiny percentages of the world population are involved in them in any way online. There's something clearly missing. At the present time, virtual environments simply lack any compelling reason to exist that motivates ...
The Virtual Whirl: Vox virtualis
A change is as good as a holiday, they say. Seriously, I don't actually know anyone who says this other than myself; though I'm assured that there are some folks out there who do. With that tragically underutilized platitude in mind, then, last week I posed a question to a spread of well-known ...
The Virtual Whirl: News of the Whirl
This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're having our monthly roundup of news items. Things that got missed, things that didn't make the cut, things that got buried, and things that really should have gotten your attention anyway. ...
Registrations open for SL Pro! conference, February
Registrations are presently open for SL Pro! a two day conference being run by Linden Lab for 'serious' professional Second Life content-creators to take place in late February this year, in Second Life itself, with a bit of help from NMC (the New Media Consortium). Unfortunately, it's a conference ...
Educators find common ground in Second Life, for now
There's no doubt in our minds that virtual environments are here to stay, for a significant fraction of the foreseeable forever. Love them or loathe them they're in their third decade now, and like the Web, it's now more a matter of how they fit in to the rest of the world, rather than if they ...
The Daily Grind: How do you learn the game?
MMOs are complicated beasts. In most games you have at least a detailed set of game mechanics and combat systems to learn. That's not even getting into things like Fallen Earth with its maddeningly expansive crafting, or EVE Online and the detailed economy, or Champions Online and a costume ...
The Daily Grind: Where else do your MMO skills come in handy?
Those of us that have been playing MMOs for quite some time have probably developed more than a few skills in the process. It's pretty much inevitable, after all -- while you might not be able to learn to dance from a boss fight, you can at least get a good sense of how to move and work as a ...
