 Okay for those of you that just showed up. Yes, you can there'll be a presentation and then optional field trip after if you'd like to go on the field trip you can get into this By going to the URL that Shan just put in the local chat I would however recommend that you go to sign dot space and Sign up for a free account and download Their software I tried it this morning and I can tell you the software works a lot better than the web browser Okay, first of all, thank you all for coming and my name is bilge mackdenburg Everybody knows me as day Miami in second life. I'm a night while I'm a high school or science teacher in Southwest Virginia and I also run a Geology program at Ferram College, so I do so two levels and First thing I want to say is thanks to everybody that showed up and What's really cool that I've noticed because I've been on all morning is that we've got some people here are diehard science Circle folks. We've also welcoming a number of people from science base that are greeters. I see captain pirate and Galen here who I've known for many years who's another educator and I hope I haven't let anybody out But thank you all for coming so Let me start with the first slide here and I want to go over my procedure, which is basically Feel free at any time to throw anything you want in local chat. I'm monitoring it I don't have a problem at all stopping what I'm saying and answering your questions or trying to address your comments I think that that is a great way to run I always run my presentation so that I allow time for questions and answers Because that's that's what I want to hear from you guys is feedback and the first thing also that I want to say about this is Science space is exciting Hello, hello, is somebody else talking What I'd ask is if you have a question or comment, please put it in local chat. Do not use voice at the request of Science space, okay But like I said, I'll be happy to address your comments and questions as we go along All right, so let me explain why I put this presentation together because it's not our sort of typical Presentation that we do here, which is For an expert to come up and talk about the latest research in chemistry or biology or geology or whatever Instead, this is more of a technology presentation and as you can see on the slide That should be rising for everybody Obviously virtual worlds and online collaborations is something that's important to all of us Whether we're at science base or whether we're part of the science circle We understand that this is the way that business should be done in the 21st century and There are also I would say experts at the Department of Education at least here in Virginia that have already penned Technology standards for students here in the state of Virginia at the high school level if you can't read I'm going to read this out to you It's computer technology standard CT 9-12 grades dot 15 see it states students will participate in online courses social and learning networks and and Virtual worlds the yet that language is actually in the standard furthermore 9-12 dot 16 C states that students will participate peers and experts to assess their projects and use Communication media to locate those experts I put the website up there if you want to take a look at it, but I think those are some amazing stands and they're not new They've been around for years The real question is how do you implement them and I've been all over the state of Virginia asking educators technicians and so on as to You know, what do you mean by a virtual world in that language? How do you do it? I think probably the best answer I've gotten is Minecraft and this is certainly One of the more popular programs that's out there You know, if you've ever if you haven't been to Minecraft basically what it is is think of Legos online With your friends and you get an infinite number of so if you look up there on the slide It shows you I built just a simple lava field around it's supposed to be granite in one project that I did with the Vistae Virginia Society of Technology and Education and Elementary school kids love this. They're doing some amazing creative work in it and There is a chat feature very much like we have in Second Life here. There's no voice capabilities or Vibox Typically people that are in Minecraft use discord when they're doing that. All right So there is one option and it's very popular in Virginia Beach They run their own servers and they get students and teachers into it Years ago. My students came to me and they said We got a question from Synergy, what's the advantage of doing virtual Legos instead of real-life Legos? You get an infinite number of them the cost of Minecraft is only 26 bucks And you get to do with your friends and yeah, there is an advantage to building your life stuff, but Kids love Minecraft. I've got some high school students that love Minecraft It's just popular and it's available on all kinds of consoles and game boys and it just runs on just about everything All right So anyway, my students came to me and they said can we do it in my school district and the answer I got was a firm. No, I was told that in order to run a Minecraft server You have to give out the IP addresses the network engineer almost had a heart attack at that He said it's no way that we're giving out our IP addresses That's just gonna open us up to all kinds of security issues the software cost 26 bucks to get into and Students were Taken their software that they had download paying the 26 bucks and throwing it on school servers So there was copyright violation. It just wasn't pretty. So needless to say they never got passed. All right Let me go back one. I know what some of you are gonna think about well, what about second life? I mean we use it all the time And it certainly is a great Platform for I think professionals getting together like we are now to discuss a wide range of topics I'm not a fan of using it for K-12 because of a couple of things and the one that you all know what I'm talking about by adult content It's out there and it's easily accessible to students and there's no age verification anymore And I've even tried using it at my college Every year I go up every year I throw up second life and I said who'd like to come in the last time I did it out of about 25 students I got one student into Second life and did a great job, but most students just aren't interested and I think part of it is the complicated interface I mean if you look at your viewer right now look at all the menus and buttons and so on It's just for somebody that's coming in it can be overwhelming So I've tried to look for other possibilities and you know me I'm a huge fan of unity and a couple of years ago Number of people came to me and said why don't you check out sign space? you already love unity and What you can do is create in Unity which is an editor and then you upload it to Sign space and we have a question from foreign am I saying it right? What about alternative viewers? so I use talking about OSM or I'm not sure Can you be a little more specific? Because I know some people have had luck with OS simulator and schools and I'm not here to if you've got your favorite virtual environment to use with students by all means use it I'm not here to say that that you know you definitely have to use sign space. I want to give you an alternative and Like I say, I'm not sure which one you're thinking of I know like I said OSM has been used for a while But in a minute, I'm gonna go over why I'm so excited about sign space and I'll be honest I resisted it for a while I had to play with it for a while But eventually I got to the point that I really like it The real big advantage and I think why sign space could really take hold in the educational community is easy access You know, you can log in with a simple website Literally, and that's what Chantel threw out is You know, you just type in whatever is sign dot space slash location slash Eagle Rock and if you've got a fast enough internet and let's be honest those of you that are educators out there How many of you have asked gee? Why are we wasting all this bandwidth on standardized testing? Okay, that bandwidth that we're not using it for standardized testing could be used for a cool tool like sign space Because if you've got faster in it like I do at my school Access via the web browser is really fast And if you hardwire that talk more about that minute into that internet man, it goes blazing fast So That's what I like about science-based. You don't have to sign for an account. You want to try it You don't have to download software and right behind me is a screenshot from the Europa sim that we're going to be going to in a little while and You know, you see that there's much fewer buttons there's a couple of tabs at the bottom and that's about it navigation is the same as in second life as we're going to see with the arrow keys and so on and Good question is science-based more moderated I would say yes, okay. I'm going to get to that in a minute. Hold on. You're a little bit ahead of me here All right One thing that I want to say here is if you're planning on using the web browser interface to get in on the optional field trip You can you'll have chat capabilities, but not voice by box does not work unfortunately on the web client you have to use the the software download All right So like I said, if you haven't done so I would encourage you to go to sign dot space and a browser sign up Click the sign up button download the software Again, this is optionally can go in as a web browser I'm hoping this presentation less no more than 30 minutes and then we'll head into Science-based some of you have already been in there. I see some of you already in there now, which is awesome All right So let me say a little bit more about science-based some of you know about Cindy Valero on second life. She ran's aeropines park and This slide shows a picture taking it aeropines park on second life And what she did was redo it with Science-based and one of the advantages of science-based is that they have something called the questing system So for example, you can interact with NPCs Non-player characters you can tell people all right go pick up 10 snowballs in 30 seconds So you can make a little games out of it There's rewards that you can put in to the questing system and in fact one of my students I'm going to talk about a minute Bailey Paxton did that for her Europa simulation So you'll get a chance to see how that's actually done with education All right, but before I get ahead of myself a number of years ago Cindy came to my Computer group and she made a presentation on Skype and said We'd like to challenge you to come up with a space research colony on another planet or moon Using unity and most of my students just bailed on it But Bailey Paxton was one that was interested in making a colony and worked on for an over a year and Just finished it in May of 2018 and we upload it It's been uploaded to the Creator server and also uploaded to The live region if you want to take a look at it for those of you that are looking for it It's called FCHS space Space colony alright, and the other one is FCHS Eagle Rock, but we'll get to that in a minute All right, one of the things Although Bailey created it. I was one that uploaded because I want to control I'm gonna talk about network security in a minute, but I firmly think that teachers should be in charge of Actually uploading you there is some it's technically difficult for the first time you do it It took me about two hours with help from Joey Obama But like I said, I think that teachers need to be able to control it and I'll speak more about that in a minute All right. So anyway, this is what the Europa research colony looks like basically Bailey put out a series of Buildings that were designed for For Living Quartz or research and we got another question is sansar is still a thing It is I have tried sansar. I've got Oculus Rift system. So I had big hopes to be honest I wasn't a big fan if you're interested in sansar. I encourage you look into high fidelity Which I think is a is a better system again I haven't been in those a lot and it's really best if you got a high end of the array But I think that would be a better way to go All right, and one of the things that's a lot of fun. You can get vehicles in science base The blue thing is what we call our war wagon that you can jump inside and drive around on Europa For fun. We also try driving around in some snowmobiles on Europa Those people inside a building are not why they not work. Good question. All right That synergy is asking me is the atmosphere pressures really low this was on the Creator server and we couldn't get EBA suits on there and Then when we put it on the live server, there is an EBA suit that you can put on when you get to Europe So it's just another second life It is a virtual environment like second life. It has a lot of the functionality to it I would disagree and say it's just another second life One of the things that people are working on is trying to come up with a k12 um Grid server and I know second life had a team grid that didn't do so well We're trying to revive that on second life Like I said, we're hoping that this takes off because it's just a lot easier for Teachers and students to get into because of the web GL interface To my knowledge second life has never been accessible in a web server on a web browser And to me that I think can make all the difference in the world because I'm gonna be honest I'm a teacher. I'm overwhelmed somebody comes to me and says, oh, I got a great idea But you got download software and you got get an account and all this stuff I'm gonna say I don't have time for that. On the other end. They just send me a URL. I'm more likely to go into it So that's what the hope is. I'm gonna say more about that in a minute All right, so let me tell you a little bit about the way that sign space is set up right now They have two servers. They have what's called a creator server Which allows people to come in and throw up their stuff play around with it And then there's the live server which has more open access to it If you create an account on sign space, you only get access to the live server Guest accounts Can get you to live server for free But to my understanding they don't work on the creator server if you want to be a creator You have to supply an email. It's got to be verified. There's some other information You have to give through sign space. It's not terribly hard So if you're interested in creating for this platform, I would encourage you to look into that Like I said creator servers used for testing and what you do is Send it to review and eventually It gets approved and sent up to the live server All right, and that's a mistake Europa colony is currently available on both Whoops clicked it too far on the creator and the live server All right All right now we're at all right So we did the Europa project and then towards the end of the school year I had a student interest in geology So we decided to do an eagle an eagle rock project a geology simulation And there actually is an eagle rock virginia. So I went there and took this picture Of eagle rock. It's a spectacular cliff in virginia with this rock that's above it And um the geology is just amazing there So what we wanted to do is to try and reproduce it as much as possible in terms of the geology and the fossils and so on And when you log in, this is what you're going to see. Um, there's a welcome sign. There's the chat There's my 2008 Chevy pickup. We were able to reproduce that. Yes If you click on it, you can actually drive it around now the networking is a little funky So if if you drive your truck around others are not going to see it because the truck is not fully networked Um, but you can certainly drive around and get out Just be careful if you get out and you walk away from it. The truck goes away. All right Um, but the idea is when you go here, there are rock samples you click on them and it Ta teaches you about what kind of rocks are there? What kind of fossils are there? Um, We have uv mapped actual textures from eagle rock on a lot of the cliffs Here so that you can get a feel for what it's like to actually do that in virginia All right, so when you click on here's an example of a ui that pops up. Um, it shows a fossil That's found from this particular area Um, here is a shot in screen of the james river bridge Which is a replica of what's actually in real life Looking towards eagle rock And the cool thing is you can fly around just like in second life if you press down on your page up Button you can fly around in science space, which is really cool as a geologist I can tell you eagle rock is actually about 90 feet or 30 meters tall and I stood at the base of it and Um, I wonder what it would be like to go up there and in the in the virtual eagle rock That's right. You can just flap your arms and you can go right to the top. It's pretty cool It's flapping like an eagle. All right, some of you brought up the network security So let's talk about that from it if I control in other words My students make a sim like eagle rock and I upload I become In charge of it and what that means is I have almost full network rights to it So if at any time I'm getting concerned about who's going in there I can shut it down a couple of mouse clicks and nobody goes into it Or I can limit it to just my friends or to a whitelist or I can open up to everybody like I've done today I can control who can res there. I can control who can speak there So I really like that that level of administrative control that you can get And I've been told that you can give administrative rights to other people haven't played around with that yet But that makes sense that you'd want to do something like that Okay, maybe give rights to a teacher that's going to be taking your students in there All right, um Going too far clicking too fast Fun Let's talk about network security. Yeah, right. You it's like the security orbs that you have here um, one of the things too that I think is really cool about science space is then If it runs on a A url Then that means web filters are not going to block and that's huge in schools I had a student try to log into one of her sims Well standardized testing was going on those you in schools know how much the tech services department locks systems down And she was able to get in that's a really good sign Because the worst thing that can happen for virtual environments is a teacher tries it and it doesn't work So we want a system like science space that allows teaching quickly and easily go in without calling the network engineer To open up the web filter for this url or that one. Now, I don't know what's going to open for all schools I'm just saying it worked for mine I would very much welcome that you try it at your school If when it resumes and let me know if you have problems Maybe we will have to open up a web filter, but at least in my school was good Um, this coming fall is going to be earth science week october I think it's 14 through the 20th and national fossil day within the united states And I'm hoping to roll out eagle rock as a way of celebrating that To my students and teachers Um, I've just done a big update. I'm waiting for it to be approved by science space But it's got all the latest geology in it and information from the state All right, the other thing that I want to put in there is problem-based learning So when I went to eagle rock you saw this big landslide of rocks coming down And one of the things that I thought would be cool for students to do is If you were to see this, what would you do if you worked for the virginia department of transportation? You don't want those rocks going on the road where they could get cars or whatever And so that's one of the things that I would throw out for students is is what are some things you could do Like bringing a backhoe and rip all that stuff out Um But something for them to think about All right, eagle rock is fully multiplayer like science space And I think that it's going to lead to collaboration online in a safe environment And for example, here I am giving a virtual field trip to a teacher on the other side of my state Um in virginia beach discussing the geology or Rocky of eagle rock And let's see here All right, um right now science space Sims that I've thrown up are free to use If you want to get your own science space account You can get a free what they call region or sim whatever term you want to use on the live server You can throw up whatever you want on the creator server They limit you to 10 concurrent users on the live server And the regions have to be 100 under 128 megs Eagle rock does that Europa does not Um If you're going to use the web gl the web browser, they recommend keep them small under 100 meg or even 50 if You're going to be going that way if you want more than that um What's the problem? Jolendi is saying This is Is not good. What's your problem if you're saying well, I need more regions or I need more ccu's or whatever Um, then uh, there is a pricing model and right now They're like 50 off. I just signed up to upgrade my regions to Um 30 concurrent users and I think I'm up to 200 512 megabytes Of uh storage per region Um, yeah, it is small. Okay, and they're purposely keeping it small They want you to go and play with it And then if you want to make something more advanced then they're going to ask you to pay for it Which I mean, I'm going to be honest. It costs the money for running servers and IT support and all that And if you go to there, I put the url for their pricing up there if you go there I think they're asking pretty reasonable I'm paying 15 bucks a month and I'm up to I think 512 megabytes Somebody at science base. Tell me if I'm wrong or go to the url But I thought the pricing was was very realistic Or very reasonable It may go up. I don't know But again, they're just giving you a little bit So that you can play around with it and then if you need more you have to pay for it. All right. Um, so like I said Okay, does anybody have any other questions before I we do the field trip because we are right on top And I appreciate those of you that That have already put some stuff in local All right, so There's the url if you want to go into it With the browser Signed out space slash location slash eagle rock take a few minutes to get in there You do not have to have an account And you can pick a guest avatar male or female to go in If you download the science base software and create an account you can use that Please make sure you don't click the button that says log on to preview server That will take you to the creator server and you won't see anybody Well, I don't know if anybody's there now. So leave that unclick because you want to go on the live server Um, can everybody see behind me? What I did was a screen capture. Oh before I say this a few other things Uh, you won't be able to get on the free verse server. That's true Galen. Um, if you do love if you do run it on the web browser Um, I would recommend chrome fire fox or safari. Those are the ones that I've used to work pretty well If you can use a wired connection that works better than wireless close off your tabs Otherwise, you might get error messages Um, I'm going to be honest. I am running Second life and I've got two other computers on sign space. I'm in both Um, the eagle rock and your old precepts on a 10 megabyte um internet connection So like I said, the client works pretty well. So you'll need you know, and yeah, that's true Galen if you try and go into the creator server then Um, you know, you'll run into that. Um, I'm going to stay in second life if you're having problems Just throw something in a local chat and what I'd really like to know Obviously, I want you to go in try the quest in Europa try eagle rock click on the rocks I think more people are in eagle rock. So why don't we start with that one? But if you could just send me a net card a no card in second life Um, just take a few minutes when we're done. Uh, maybe at, um Was it 10 55 slt time? Um, just tell me if you were able to get in Were you using the web browser? Were you using the client? What problems you ran into?