On 04/10/10 14:29, Jeff Mao wrote:
Please excuse the x-post
Greetings all,
This is sightly off-topic, but I figured this was a community that could
help point me toward the people who could help me solve a
challenge...here it is (this is a little long)...
In my real life, I work for the State of Maine, Department of Education,
and I oversee the Maine Learning Technology Initiative. It is the United
State's largest 1:1 student computing program. Currently, we have 70,000
users (students, teachers, and administrators) in grades 7-12. Annually,
we host a student conference at the University of Maine. About 1000 kids
attend annually, and it is a time for kids to share what they are doing
and to learn from others -- all things that are powered by the fact that
we have a unique scenario...every student has a State issued MacBook
laptop computer.
Part of the day each year, we host an "ubër session" where all 1000 kids
are in an auditorium together and do something that really demonstrates
the power of the scale of the program. Last year, we played at
www.freerice.com <http://www.freerice.com/> and in 45 minutes, the kids
donated 2.4 million grains of rice to the World Food Program by
answering vocabulary questions.
This year, we were thinking of doing a virtual world project. Here's
what we were thinking...rather then attempt to set up enough servers for
all the kids to login to a grid together (its already a challenge to
create a wireless network that can host 1000 concurrent users in one
auditorium), we were thinking that each student would host their own sim
(the other benefit to this is that when they leave, they take their sim
with them and can use it anytime anywhere). To connect the session to
the larger theme of the student conference (STEM education) we are
focusing on energy this year. The activity we wanted them to play with
for the hour we have is to play with energy use. To do so, we wanted to
preload the default avatar inventory with some scripted items like a
plasma TV, toaster, microwave oven, etc. In addition, things like small
windmills, solar panels, etc. The idea is to let the kids drag these
items out into their world, and with a HUD of some sort, be able to
monitor electrical use even with these items "off". And then be able to
turn them on, and see what happens to their energy draw...add a solar
panel, and see what it takes to offset their electrical use, etc.
None of that is hard except...hosting your own sim. We've looked at the
opensim project, and it appears that their is potential here, and we're
only at the start of investigating this...but here's our initial barriers:
1) The students are not administrators on their laptops, so the sim and
any supporting frameworks (ie mono) need to be able to be installed into
the user home directory without an administrator
password.http://github.com/diva/d2
Unfortunately, I believe mono can only be installed with administrator
privileges on Mac.
2) How to set up a dynamic "map" so that once the 1000 kids each have a
sim running, how to visit each other's sim?
In principle, you could do this by enabling hypergrid on OpenSim. Hypergrid allows avatars from different installations
of OpenSim to visit other installations without having to be in the same grid (which would require a large amount of
network traffic). There are some details at
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Installing_and_Running_Hypergrid
which I believe relate to Hypergrid 1.0 in OpenSim 0.6.9. Later OpenSim versions run a revision called Hypergrid 1.5
which I believe uses different commands which are not yet well documented (?).
Although HG can be set up on OpenSim, you may want to take a look at the Diva
Distribution
http://github.com/diva/d2
which comes with Hypergrid pre-configured.
I suspect this will all be very technically challenging - I'm guessing 1000 simultaneous users is significantly higher
than any scaling scenario seen so far with this architecture....
So, the question for the wisdom of this group...anyone ever try anything
of this sort? Anyone know who we should be talking to? Maybe someone at
Linden Labs would be interested in playing with this with us? This event
is scheduled for the end of May 2011, so that's our timeline for any
development that we might need to get done to make this happen.
Thanks in advance for any wisdom you might have...
Jeff Mao
Learning Technology Policy Director
Maine Department of Education
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
SL: Geoffrey Mayo
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Justin Clark-Casey (justincc)
http://justincc.org
http://twitter.com/justincc
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