Virtual Shop Class - This is not a Chair

The IML 104 class is exploring Virtual Worlds this Semester and the past two weeks we've been exploring Second Life. The last class was dedicated to introducing the Honors students to building in Second Life which is unique compared to most Virtual Worlds where the environment is rigidly controlled by the Organizations that run them. Second Life has many places to Learn to build the most popular being the Ivory Tower of Primitive, which leads you through the many steps of learning to build, but these areas can be overwhelming to the new Avatar so I decided to make an extremely condensed crash course introduction to 3D modeling in SL. And as it turns out making a chair puts all of the basic skills into one neat little usable object. The Class learned how to create an object, copy, modify, Link, Texture, and add the Sit Script to it. At the end of the class we all Sat near each other and repositioned them to 500 meters above (something you can't do usually) and looked at the region below. Students were than asked to Share this 3D object with each other and to modify them over the weekend. In 90 minutes students with very little experience in SL and most having never created a 3D object before were able to create make not only a useful virtual item, but one that was personalized as well.