Coding in the sky

The new academic year is about to start for my Foundation Degree students in software Development and I have been thinking of ways that I could incorporate Second Life into the delivery. Thinking about where to hold these sessions, I must say that I was impressed by some of the low cost Holodecks that are around for purchase in SL Marketplace at the moment and was tempted to buy one in, but I do like to apply myself to a little building now and then and decided instead to create a sky platform for the purpose.

I have introduced a little background ambience into the feature by including a visual running water effect, running water sounds and some random bird songs. My plan is to run regular evening, probably once a week, after class programming and design tutorials. I am using the Firestorm viewer at the moment, principally because it supports shared media on a prim, without all the compatible SL mesh issues that seem to have defeated my own PC for now. This means that I can make use of web resources such as an online C compiler, there is a nice compiler available here, and a screen shot of myself running a simple C program.

Another board that features our College vle, so that we can make use of portfolio exercises and also we can post directly toForums, a third and final media board displays a web based poster of student avatar images and names.

Not sure yet whether we shall be using voice or text chat for the conversation, but I will take the popular vote on that. If we do use text chat, then I shall install a logger so that we can review the sessions.

Back soon with some more news, bye for now Skipper