Using your book in a intro to programming class
Hello Mr. Heaton(and others),
We are using your book in an introduction to programming class taught at our university. This is one of our "distance learning"/internet based classes. Most of the students are local students to our university, however.
The class will be taught entirely in the Second Life universe. It is designed for students that have no previous programming knowledge. The idea is that they would be able to then continue to more advanced languages in our department, such as C, C++ or Java.
Have you, or anyone, ever taught or attended such a class. Any suggestions?
Dean
p.s. I really like the into to LSL book, very nicely done!
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Glad to hear you liked the book and will be using it in a class.
By using taught fully inside of Second Life, do you mean no physical class time at all? I suppose that is not that different than an internet class. Are you going to use traditional internet teleconference type technology to deliver the lectures, or are you planning on teaching them totally in the metaverse?
I did teach classes, mostly in the metaverse(SL world). I used SL-voice chat and could talk to a group of students. Usually I had around 5 students so it did not get too crazy. I basically opened up the land, it was on a private island, so the students could all build. So it was part lecture part practical hands-on where the students would build their own things and I could even modify their scripts, with the right permissions.
However, for the lecture slides, I pointed them to websites. I suppose I could have loaded the slides as textures, but it worked out well having them just hit a webpage and listen to me talk in the background. The new viewer might be able to totally integrate this, I have not tried... yet.