This week has seen a substantial amount of work come into existence for me when my HE students began their adventures on a virtual field trip to Isidis Planitia, that’s on the surface of Mars, and not by coincidence the landing point of the Beagle2 spacecraft, virtual worlds are just great. If by chance you are up for putting yet another ‘e’ version of eLearning into operation then you may like to consider emmersiveLearning. The main project is to use solar energy to provide heating and lighting for some form of accommodation written in Java, such was the original design spec. At that time though the group had no idea as to what type of accommodation or its location, and that was presented to them in the last period Monday, welcome to Mars.
This week has seen a substantial amount of work come into existence for me when my HE students began their adventures on a virtual field trip to Isidis Planitia, that’s on the surface of Mars, and not by coincidence the landing point of the Beagle2 spacecraft, which you can just see in the foreground, virtual worlds are just great. If by chance you are up for putting yet another ‘e’ version of eLearning into operation then you may like to consider emmersiveLearning. The main project is to use solar energy to provide heating and lighting for some form of accommodation written in Java, such was the original design spec. At that time though the group had no idea as to what type of accommodation or its location, and that was presented to them in the last period Monday, welcome to Mars.
So they could get an idea about the temperature ranges on a typical day on Mars, I produced a small weather station, and it produces some reasonable values for wind speed, temperature and barometric pressure.
First off I put together new region in Open Sim, then terra-formed and textured the scene. I required some space type accommodation and variation, so that everyone could have a personalised space. I found a really nice solution Tube City at OpenSim-Creations, this is a free set of buildings that matched the requirement very nicely, though I did re-texture them. Here you can see part of the collection they have to choose from, in fact I decided on some groupings first and then put them into a lucky dip that everyone drew from. Have received the components its was just a case of them taking a copy for each build.
Well that was Monday afternoon and writing this now on Thursday morning as you can see there has been some enthusiastic work going on. I have been making the odd voyage to the red planet during the day and usually find some of the group in there discussing and working away at the task . While I need no convincing as to the collaborative benefits that exist using these real time 3D environments, the experience this week has been very rewarding in itself.
The Overview and feedback from a 32 question student survey of the Life on Mars project is now available in the small hall of the main building here at Shimmer Island in Second Life or from this web link. The project itself was the result of work carried out by a group of level 5 Foundation Degree students here at Bromley College currently enrolled on the Network Computing course. The project was established in order to provide students with a virtual world field trip to the planet Mars. The project itself was in support of a final year assignment to produce a desktop simulation for a solar powered lighting and heating control system written in Java. In order to give student avatars a realistic experience of the planet Mars the following was carried out: - the terrain was terra-formed and suitably textured. For effect, the sound of wind was introduced, as was the arrival of random particle dust storms. Each student was allocated a unique combination of building components, which they formed into a connected accommodation unit. A small weather station was placed on the surface that relayed temperatures and wind speeds throughout the Martian day that was reasonably consistent with those found on the planet. Finally, each avatar came ready installed with spacesuit, boots, gloves, helmet and backpack life support. Please feel free to download the pdf and comment to this posting. 
