Library's Second Life island opens a gaming sculpture garden

Students in a Multimedia Digital Games course have created a garden of sculptures of historical characters from videogames like MS Pacman or Link on the library's Second Life island. Come visit the garden of sculptures and strange objects. Pick up a hat or teleport through a portal.

The Gaming Garden is located on the McMaster University Library Second Life island, Steel City. McMaster has been developing this and other virtual spaces for teaching and learning. Now students are learning to sculpt and program as part of classes. Imagine creating a sculpture as an assignment!

Why Second Life? One of the challenges professor Geoffrey Rockwell faced designing the Digital Games class was coming up with meaningful assignments that would introduce students to an aspect of game design while being manageable in the context of a larger theoretical class. Rockwell, librarian Shawn McCann and a fourth year student Dave Marhal teamed up to make Steel City not just a place students could go, but make it a place they could create. Student Dave Marhal was the key as he was designing the Library island as his Multimedia Senior Thesis project. He ended up setting up the sculpture garden and designing tutorials for students.

Now Shawn and David are preparing for a "ribbon cutting ceremony" for the sculpture garden to which we can invite the students and others to celebrate what the students have created for others. Of course there will be no way to serve snacks in the garden, at least real snacks, but the ribbon can be cut over and over and "real-life" snacks will be served nearby.

Some of the lessons learned are:

1. We need the virtual infrastructure where students can create and show their creations. The more accessible these spaces are the more students will create with a larger public in mind. Second Life is just one type of space.

2. Students don't like to be programmed by the computer - they like to participate in creating the virtual.

3. Students can easily learn to create sophisticated objects in Second Life and to program them with simple actions. Virtual worlds and virtual learning is not just for geeks.

Immersive Learning Librarian Shawn McCann hopes to see more projects like this being initiated. "We're continually exploring the possibilities of our space in Second Life" says McCann. "We're looking at how we can partner in teaching and learning, in addition to extending our library services and delivering library collections in these virtual spaces."

The ribbon cutting ceremony will take place on Friday, April 11th from 1-2:30pm in Togo Salmon Hall, room 202b. Please contact Catherine Baird at bairdca@mcmaster.ca if you are interested in attending.