On Oct 4, 2010, at 5:36 PM, Serendipity Seraph wrote:

> If you had a good enough script to get the mono bits and build them locally 
> then the local mono executable *may* be enough.  Just a thought.    So a 
> script that got mono and built that (assuming the kids have the mac developer 
> tools on their boxes) and got the diva distro and ran its setup could perhaps 
> work.
> 

Duh.  Build it on any machine with privileges then give the students a tar or 
zip and script to locally run everything.   Also, doesn't the school have some 
way to change what is on the kids's machines (remote admin)?


> - s
> 
> On Oct 4, 2010, at 5:22 PM, Justin Clark-Casey wrote:
> 
>> 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
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Opensim-users mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Justin Clark-Casey (justincc)
>> http://justincc.org
>> http://twitter.com/justincc
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