Matrix Arithmetic Poster

The steady stream of visitors to my Seascape Island sim has been encouraging and the feature of having a simple vendor to distribute course materials such as the C code has proven a good decision. I decided cash in on the approach and provide a poster board that explained the basic operations of Matrix Arithmetic, which will I am sure be of use when my students are here discussing and trying out examples. Of course providing a notecard for is not really feasible given the special characters required by way of very large brackets. The answer I decided was to create a texture and have the poster board serve the jpeg to the avatars Inventory texture folder when touched, hence the invite just below the red title. If you are wondering how I can gauge the usage of the latest resources, well I have installed a script that will write the avatars name, name of the resources plus date and time to a MySql database that is running on one of our web servers, neat little facility this, and indispensible really if you are keen to get some user metrics. Bye for now Skipper

C Matrix examples in-world

Seascape Island seems to be getting a fare amount of attention from my students, which geven the fact its end of term break is very encouraging in itself. I am finding that different images are showing on prim faces when I return to the sim, this must mean that the Second Life Viewer 2 features of Shared Media on a prim are proving to be popular. One of those shared media takes the form of a web based real time C compiler, and to compliment this particular tool, I have added an freebie crate of C source code examples for matrices. I am hoping for some early feedback on these, which should not take to long as I have just posted the news my course Facebook page. regards Skipper

Adding some ambience

Having started to get some materials together for my new Seascape island venture with level 3 mathematics, I decided it would be nice to include some ambient effects and features as well. A while ago I was looking for some sea shore decorations for my own sim over at Shimmer Island Star Beach and came across Real Waves, anyway I purchased some Real Wave effects, which I must say are superb and decided to include the sim in my SL profile picks. Why am I telling you all this, well because as a result, Real Waves sent me some freebies and one of them was the NEW OFFSIM - all only 3 prims Created by Antreas Alter that features Wild Oceanic Waves Splashing on the Rocks and Calm Beach Waves washing the shore! Anyway I installed just offshore, and the effect is a definate improvment over the previous somewhat empty horizon.

Virtual Learning at SeaScape Island

For the summer term I have picked up the unit Mathematics for IT Practitioners, and the learning outcomes for the unit I am pleased to see are in fact very closely linked to our Software Development pathway. Looking at the requirements and thinking about ways to get some much needed student engagement with the subject, I thought this would be a good opportunity to explore the possibilities of trying out the facilities available with the Second Life viewer 2. I have a strip of virtual land on the Greenwich University sim and set about creating a build. The result of my efforts shown here in the screen shot, is as you can see a four floor modular design, the idea here is of having each floor service a specific Learning Outcome; listed below: 1 Be able to apply matrix methods 2 Be able to apply sequences and series, probability and recursion 3 Be able to apply number systems 4 Be able to interpret data. We have only just started the unit and so I have begun the process of installing resources such as video screens linked to YouTube tutorials an on-line matrix calculator and because I really want to link this unit as closely as I can to the programming activities, a real time C compiler. During the maths class today I switched our network connection over to by-pass the college proxy and gave the group a demo. Will my student group take advantage of the collaborative and enriching features of a virtual world emersive work environment, time will tell. Right now I just need to get them in and trying out the resources. By way of getting some kind of basic metric with regard to usage I have installed a visitor counter in the landing point flag. Please stay in touch for further postings. Regards Skipper