 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 5 p.m. to 5 30 p.m. session of the 2017 Open Simulator Community Conference. As a reminder to our in-world and web audience, you can view the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org, and tweet your questions or comments, too, at OpenSimCC with the hashtag OSCC17. This session, we are happy to introduce a wonderful session called Creating a Place for Learning Spanish Language Learning at Escape. Our speakers today are James Abraham and Marta Eugenia Lino. Let me introduce them. James T. Abraham, PhD, has been working in virtual world since 2006. As El Professor in OpenSim, he created Mi Casa Esucasa, an immersive interactive Mexican village with realistic buildings and over 25 learning activities. For the last several years, he has been using OpenSimulator to create an even bigger immersive experience at Spanish language learning at Escape. Marta Eugenia Lino is a Spanish teacher and owner of the educational project Spanish with Eugenia, teaching in Mexico and the Metaverse. Eugenia shares her knowledge and love of her native country, Mexico, with her students in the virtual world. She also serves as academic director and creates rich cultural exhibits for Escape. Welcome all, and let's begin the session. James. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining Eugenia and I tonight. We just wanted to have a chance to share our work with you that we've been doing actually that we started in Second Life and now we've moved over to OpenSim. And Eugenia still is teaching in Second Life, but I've made the full transition over to OpenSim. And we created originally a space called Mi Casa Esucasa as I was Callisto Encinal. And we decided I lost my funding from my university, so we had to go find another way to create our space. And the idea was to create an immersive study abroad experience for students. I teach at a community college, so my students typically don't have the chance to study abroad. They're working a lot and can't get away. So my idea was to create a space where they could come in for a couple hours a week and have a fully immersive experience and kind of replicate that study abroad experience. So imagine if you had people playing roles within the space. And I told my students to go in and go to the bank and take out $20 and then go to the bakery and buy a couple loaves of bread and then go to the Plaza and talk to the bum that's there and give them a loaf of bread and share some time. Imagine the rich experiences that they could have. I think I'm preaching to the choir here when I say that virtual worlds could provide that for our students, and that was our goal. It's kind of morphed. It's, as you probably know, difficult to find people all the time to staff something like that. So we've done some experimenting with NPCs that we'll talk about in a little bit. But our goal was to create this space. Eugenia Moore for role playing. She does a little more advanced classes. So she uses the space primarily for role playing and meeting with her students. I teach lower level Spanish. So 101. So I wanted to really create a textbook like experience within the 3D world. So I've actually converted all my content to open educational resources. So all the book learning is online and available for free. And then I meet my students in world and there are different types of learning activities there for them. And there's student to student interactions. There's student professor interactions. There's solo interactions and the unique variety of experiences. I think really shows the depth of what virtual worlds are capable of. I have not run across one thing that I have not been able to do that I do in class that I haven't been able to do in the virtual world. The only thing would be to touch a student, which is probably frowned upon anyway. So it's a good thing. Any kind of experience that you want to create is absolutely possible within the virtual world. I haven't found anything that has not been possible. So we've created several different environments replicating a Mexican town, but it really could be any kind of Spanish speaking country town. It's pretty generic across the board. And within those different locations, we've created learning activities. And so within these learning activities, they cover the scope of Spanish 101. So basically present tense verbs, gustar, a lot of vocabulary. So imagine if you go into a house instead of typically now in a college textbook, you'll just get a vocabulary list at the end of the chapter in the book. And that's pretty staying at pretty one dimensional. Imagine if you could go into a house and just start clicking on objects and seeing the word and hearing a voice, audio file, modeling the pronunciation, creating a really rich. Just look at where you're sitting now and imagine if you were a language learner and you wanted to know how to say things and you could just touch them and it would tell you what it was and it would talk to you. You could interact with it. That's what kind of experience we can create in virtual worlds and we've created at escape. So embedded with all the different are the typical things that you would find in a Mexican town, all the different locations, clothing shops, sporting goods, markets, theaters, plaza, all those different type of things. And really what we want to do today is just kind of wet your appetite to come and visit us. It's really hard to explain in 20 minutes what all we have. We really want to just give you a postcard to make you want to come and visit and kick the tires and come around and walk the streets of escape to see what it's like. Let's go into the next slide. So our learning activities embedded within all the spaces are these green balls. I wanted to make it so it's not necessarily jumping out at you that there's things to touch. It looks like a pretty natural environment, but there's these green balls situated around that if you click on, it'll pop up a menu for you. And the first stage was the acquisition stage. So that would be the acquire, the aprender where you're going to learn. So I make no cards explaining grammar points or send you to videos to find out, get a little background information to learn. So when you're done learning, then you can go to the practical stage. The practical is where you get a chance to practice producing. First of all, and actually within the practical, there's two levels. There's the recognition phase. So at first you'll just be recognizing the vocabulary or the grammar structures. And then in the second phase, you actually have to produce it. So it'll ask you a question you have to put in the word for that vocabulary item, or it'll be a grammar question. You have to answer the question by actually typing it out. And the students earn XP points for this. So as they're doing practice, because they're being rewarded for all their work and eventually down the road as we build this out, we'll have a reward system where they can purchase clothing or other trinkets to satisfy that need to get work done and produce and acquire things so that rewarding. And then finally, probably what the instructors are interested in is the exam and phase. So they would then take a test on again two phases, recognition and then production. And this is actually stored in a database and you have to get 100% on this exam and to get credit for it. So it goes into a database and there's a web interface and also in world interface where you can find out what you've completed and what's available in each space. So you click on, there's signs marking what the space is called. For instance, in the PLASA, there's a sign that says PLASA. And you click on that and it tells you all the different activities that are available there for you and what level they are. So that would be for a student to go in and work on on their own. And then instructor could meet them, walk them through. This is often what I spend time doing with students is helping them walk through it. They're not so familiar with virtual world. So sometimes they just need to have their hand held as they click on things and they're not used to seeing all the things in the screen. So that's really has become my role is just facilitating the learning in the 3D world. So that's kind of an overview of our learning activities. Then what we've also done is created a level of learning aids. So we have our own HUD, which is the production for the vocabulary audio. So if you click on a targeted vocabulary item, the word will appear and you'll hear a sound file. And when I was working in Second Life, when I originally created this idea concept, there was a lot of crosstalk. There were students all in there and it was playing on the public channel. So our HUD allows it to just play within that HUD. So each student could have an individual experience and you don't have any crosstalk. So that you could have 10 students and they're all clicking on objects and they're all not hearing each other's clicking and stuff that they're clicking on. And we also have teleporting so you can teleport. You can put a question mark and it'll tell you all the places that you can teleport. So it makes it easy to get around the space and we have a dictionary and then we have web screen. So if you pop on the power button, it'll pop open a little web screen so you can go to URLs to see what's going on. And then there's this little parrot that you see on the slide that gives you feedback. It's kind of another level. All those learning activities to give you feedback. So when you get an answer correct, you get a ta-da, or a trumpet blast. And when you get a wrong answer, you get a wah-wah-wah or a whammy kind of sound to give the students a little bit of interaction as they're going through. Besides visual clues to colors will change red if it's wrong, green if it's correct. So they're seeing, they're getting a lot of feedback, a lot of information about how they're doing on their learning. I experiment, I'm not going to talk too much about this personal assistant. I really wanted to have like a NPC that walked around with you. That was kind of like a helper bot and I'm still working on that to get that all created. But I think that has a lot of potential too. So you would walk around in this instead of getting feedback from the parrot there, you'd get a feedback from NPCs. But talking about NPCs, we've created two different types. First of all, we have static NPCs that are just mesh items that I've pulled in. And they're easy to script and they give a sense of presence. One of the big complaints about virtual worlds is that they're empty. If you walk into Escape, you'll see they're not moving around per se, but they're there. So it looks like there's people there. And within these, then I've embedded activities. So this is the simple greetings in the plaza. If you click on these people, they'll ask you a question about like, Como estas? Como te llamas? What is your name? How are you doing? And then you have to answer a question. And then if you get it right, you go into a database and you don't have to answer that one again. So the idea of students has acquired that knowledge. They don't have to practice that again necessarily. And then we have our moving NPCs. So these are the fully scripted NPCs that come in OpenSim. And it's been such a great joy for me to come into OpenSim with these NPCs rather than in Second Life because they're really easy to script, especially if you use some of the models that have been provided. Fred did a great job providing his NPCs. So you can just tweak the code a little bit and get what you want. But this is a picture from our restaurant. So we have a fully integrated restaurant interaction where the waitress comes out and tells you to sit. And then you go through the whole food order, beverage order. And then at the end, she actually calculates your bill and gives you the bill. And then she asks if you want to leave a tip or not. So it's kind of fun. It would be really cool. And I tell people when I show them this, could you imagine this with voice recognition? So the machine would grade you on your scale, how well you were interacting with that. And then go on to the next question all through voice. Right now it's all through menu, but it really has a lot of potential. I think if we could ever get voice into virtual worlds. But I'm working on one that's a pharmacy. So imagine going into a pharmacy. And this is the way to get around having to have actors come in. So you can have a pretty interactive scripted model with these NPCs. For basic students, that's good. They want to work off a script and they want to have a limited set of interactions. And that's what we want. For more advanced students, you might want to have the instructor play the waitress. So then you could have a more free form interaction. And at this point, I'll turn it over to Eugenia, who's going to talk about our wonderful cultural activities. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, James. If you let me sit, please, could you move your avatar? Can you just look over the screen? I mean, yes, please change the slide. Did you change? Yes, you did. Your avatar on the place to speak. Well, it's OK. Well, hi, Eugenia. Oh, thank you very much. I am here. OK. Well, how do I use Escape, our theme? I use, of course, all the activities Professor James have created, has created. But in my experience, where my students get more the knowledge, they can get the language practicing, playing. I mean, with immersion. In real life, as we do in real life, we organize activities. We have classes, of course. We have parties. We sing. We dance. We make some field trips, et cetera. And I discover when I start teaching here in virtual worlds in second life, I work, of course, in second life. And in the world, another virtual world also. I discover I can create. I can get that immersion in virtual worlds. So I start teaching in second life. How I get the immersion? Well, in second life, well, it's virtual worlds. We have avatars. And in that, I can use that tools to teach and to get my students learn the language. So I, well, I start organizing activities like parties or cultural activities. Well, specifically cultural activities. As you can see on the slide, we have Professor James and me. We organize, for example, we celebrate the Mexican independence. I am Mexican, by the way. And we create cultural activities. We celebrate. We perform the celebration of Mexican independence. We organize exhibition about Day of the Dead because it's a very important celebration in Mexico. We have in escape. Well, we have a lot of the all activities Professor James have created, but we also have the Casa de la Cultura Cultural House. In that cultural house, we put some exhibition about Day of the Dead, the Christmas time in Mexico, how we celebrate. Well, especially in Mexico. Because it's the cultural know and but also we put exhibition about Mexican Revolution, Mexican independence, the International Women's Day. Well, a lot of activities during the year we have a lot of activities we can do like we do in real life. So that is the reason for me for, well, specifically for me, it's very, very important to the virtual world. I use Second Life. I use BG World. And now I am exploring another world like it's a French, the French grid. So well, more, more virtual world. And I don't know, of course, the how to make some scripts. But it's not necessary. I know that all the things creators have created in the virtual world helped me. Helped me a lot. The places to build something, the animation, gestures. When we dance, when we use streams, of course, we sing songs in Spanish. And at the same time, I use the activities on escape, the grammar activities. I also, well, I use a lot the role play. We visit the airport, we visit the bank. We go to the restaurant and also we practice the dialogue at the restaurant. And well, all of that, we get that immersion in virtual world to help a student to get the language. And that is very important. And that is the reason I use Escape. Okay, well, that is my participation, the way I work with virtual world in escape specifically. Well, we can do a lot of things, a lot of things at Escape. Okay, so, please go ahead. Okay, is that it? We're running out of time, so do you have more to wrap it up? Nope, I think I'm good. Okay, great. Well, thank you, James and Marta, for a wonderful presentation. Thank you. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session, the next session will begin at 5.30 p.m. in this keynote region and is entitled mixed reality holo presence or holo presence, whichever you prefer, for avatars. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 17 poster Expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC Expo 2 region, along with sponsor and crown funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and to our audience.