 and welcome to the 4 o'clock to 4.30 p.m. session of the 2020 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are happy to introduce a session called Connecting During COVID, Unlocking a High School Prom in OpenZim. Our speakers today are Randall Deich and Tanya Martin. Randall, aka Longison Deich, is a results-driven program manager and an instructional designer with success in developing effective learning experiences. As co-founder and chief networking officer of Regenerate Tech, Randall partners with industry professionals to develop learning pathways for underserved students. Tanya, aka Gridjumper, is an online gamer, former computer science teacher, and professional development professional. She is on the Regenerate Tech board working to promote authentic experiences for students in the community. Now please check out the website located at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of the sessions, and the full schedule of events. The session is being live-streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets too at OpenSimCC with the hashtag OSCC20. Welcome, everyone. Let's begin the session. Well, thank you for that introduction and the opportunity to share an incredible story about Connecting During COVID. And I want to thank Gridjumper for joining me here today. Yeah, I'm just having difficulty advancing the slides, which was working the other day. It happens. I want to, you know, start off by saying this story begins last March and March 13th was the last day our students saw each other. March 12th, everything was fine. As a matter of fact, that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, we were all planning to continue to go to school. And March 13th was the stay-home orders. And I think as of today, it's been 267 days since we've physically connected. And the great news is that the OpenSim experience that we had with our students kind of turned their attitudes around. This is, let's start this. This is a happy ending. Let me just say this is a happy ending of, like I mentioned, a COVID story that everybody likes. And this is the student feedback at the end on they're actually telling me that after months of being apart, it was this experience where they actually connected. It was for the first time they got to see each other and ignore the problems and that was happening around them. This was a community that was heavily hit with unemployment. Food drives are miles long around the corner, you know, at the food bank. And this was more than a problem for them. This truly was an escape. So we can go on to the next. We kind of just start ready. Yeah, this is what Trayvon shared with us. This is text message, how he felt. You know, when I see this, he's sending this to me after midnight in the morning. So what do you do when a senior, you know, text you at midnight? That's how he feels. So when Randy talked to me, of course, the point of this, that of this slide is that this community, it's just a testament to how they come together and how generous they are because I mentioned it to one person. And I said, gee, there's a friend of mine who's got these high school kids and they don't have a prom and they don't have graduation. And gee, I wish they could have a prom somewhere in world. And he said, well, why don't you try Abapon? So the next night I'm playing with my warrior sisters on World of Workraft who I met in Second Life. And mind you, have never met these people in real life. And two individuals who do a lot of the social planning for VWB PE and ISTE, they said, I'll help. So then I got in contact with Joyce Betancourt on Abacon and she said, we'll help. And then there was Franz and the Abacon grid folks and they all said, we'll help. And it's just a testament to the generosity of these people who did not, who just did this all for nothing. Well, for something, but they gave their time. They went shopping on Kitely and bought things. They went on Second Life. They purchased things and made things and created things in order to give these children a prom. And none of us, I mean, Randy and I know each other in real life, but none of these other people I have ever, ever met. And that was just so cool to do this for these children. So we met in World and we had multiple meetings. We started in March, as Randy said, you know, like March 15, 16, something like that. And the prom was the 12th. So we started, we met probably, you know, weekly with the group from Abacon. And then the main builder, Helena Barber Seton, makes this platform up in the sky, which subsequently some of the students found as they were looking around. But she made a platform and the production started. Here she's working on a scavenger hunt game, on some clothing. The Abacon crew was leaving items for us to add to the prom if we needed. And we would just pop in here and there. I would pop here. Helena Barber Seton is working on her game. You know, so we started off with the Save the Date. And this was something that we sent out, not just to students, our teachers, and also the folks in my community partners that I work with, with Regenerate Tech on volunteers and also sponsors. And, you know, this was the first prom where it was free for the students. And, you know, there was no overhead for the students. But we asked for sponsors, and I'll jump ahead a little bit, because we wanted everyone to have a prom meal. So we recruited, we had sponsors that paid for Uber Eats for everybody received a warm meal that evening as well. Get the next. Our students, we wanted to make sure everybody was able to connect. And we couldn't use the school board laptops for download and install privileges. So we had active participants with their personal laptops who used the Firestorm Browser. But we streamed on Discord. And so students were able to connect with their friend on Discord and participate, you know, a passive participation. They didn't have their own avatar, but they were still able to interact with folks that were in world. And our chaperones and supporters, they ended up enjoying the same experience as our students. They were part of the orientation. They dressed up and danced and had fun along with them. And it was great because we've had folks from the technical schools there as volunteers. We've had our administrators. We're also volunteering and district volunteers. So for them, this was their first experience into an open sim environment. And hopefully, you know, the follow up for this year of a little bit easier and a little bit more involvement in coordinating our work together. And what was prepared for the students was an incredible orientation session where by walking through this maze, you've actually had, you know, directions. And as an educator, I loved it because every section had a performance assessment. So it wasn't just read and move along. Before you've moved along, you had to demonstrate something. You had to do something. And it was great to see the how quickly that from everybody was at a point of zero that not only learned in the orientation session, but I believe the next slide might even show we had two of our students and they're the robots. They changed their skins on us that our students started taking over the orientation as well because we couldn't schedule, but didn't work out with the original schedules. So they'd log on on their own and they would walk students through the orientation, their peers, they would take them to the dressing rooms and help them with their clothing and completely took over. It was a great model for building capacity and ownership with the kids. So the students decided that they wanted a medieval kind of theme and I'm not sure where the castle came from, maybe Kitely, but Helena had it. And we added the logos and things so that the students were gathering photographs and they were gathering items. And one of the things that they gave us was the logo for the school. So of course, we put the logo in the school colors all over. This was the main location for the event. We also did not want to have like, okay, we're here now what moments. So we kind of went a little heavy on, let's do this, let's do this. And there was a little bit of trying to help the students, but we just kind of ran out of time when having them create some of the content. But we had a hanging garden with a with an arcade, which we bought the machines on Kitely. Oops, I keep doing this with the right. Okay, there we go. We had a photo shop. I'm not sure that this was used, but you know, we just wanted to make sure that we had plenty of stuff. We had a fire campfire and a working boat that did require some scripting to go up and down the little lake there in Avacon. And this was the big hit. We had a photo garden. Over 100 photographs, actual real life pictures of the students were uploaded into these. And that was something that we thought the students could do, but I think Randy ended up doing them because we were just kind of running out of time. But the students did select the photographs to go up and the night of that probably was one of the highlights. And then ultimately we had, of course, all the clothing, which we did have dressing rooms, which to my knowledge, they really weren't used that much. They just got changed right then and there. And in the night of they were changing and a real plus, I think son created some jewelry for us. And they had the logo again, the panther of their of the school that they attend. So as Randy said, it was a free event. They didn't have to pay for shoes, for clothes, for corsages, for their hairdos. Everything was there for them. Kind of an equalizing moment because, you know, like you could pick whatever you wanted and no one was out doing anybody else. You want to go back? Yeah, what they were doing is and they shared also pictures that they took their screenshots. That's actually Andrew or senior standing next to his avatar standing next to his real life picture. That's there. So they spend the evening looking for themselves and taking photographs. It was memorable. And this is where we started. We started, you know, and we had our agenda. And if you remember, you know, not only this was the opportunity, we had our valedictorian speak. Our salutatorian was there. Our student government sponsors spoke. The senior class president spoke. These were things that were easily, you know, they said they planned for and March 13, it was all wiped away. So we brought back everything. And at that time, this was also something that they've requested was the moment of silence for George Floyd as well. You know, they helped organize the agenda for us. And there was a dance, I think was incredibly popular because of the incredible song list that Shamara put together. I think the song list was actually still talked about today by the kids who participated and their music. And that was all, you know, supported by our volunteers. And during the course of the event, you know, a way to explore the island with a scavenger hunt and, you know, clues were given. So that's that was a way of giving in the orientation to the island. They all explored and they had a leader board with the winners and our sponsors provided the prizes for our students. And not just the scavenger hunt got prizes, but they also voted for the best dressed. And it seemed to be a more of a political experience or who was the best, who provided the best argument because they all had access to the same clothes or who accessorized the mess. What it turned out to be. And one of the things that, you know, we realized as we move forward, there's definitely areas to improve on. And I think with a longer timeline, knowing now that we're in December and we're interested in prom, we can actually have students starting to work on some of the things and have them terraform themselves and maybe build and build and be part of the experience, not just, you know, not just consume it. Speaking of consume, I love the Uber Eats on that last slide. So in closing, do you have a particular slide that you'd like to wrap up on? The student feedback. I like everybody, you know, that's our, I think our last slide that's there. Everyone's talking about the social emotional wellness right now with students being remote learning. And everyone's, you know, remote learning has a bad taste in the mouth right now because they're being zoomed to death or teamed to death, not realizing a solution is right there in front of them. And if they just listen to the students and they'll realize that we can take care of these needs now. And like Tonya and Grinch upper mentioned, the volunteers, this is incredible what they've done and memorable as well. So it couldn't happen without them. Great. Anything you want to share? I'm just looking forward to the next chapter to see because I know there's one student who's working on Blender and is actually creating content. And as they, you know, we had limited content. We also had limited kind of, I mean, we made sure that we had, you know, skin tones and some hairstyles that were appropriate for the population, but it was limited, you know, and I think that these students say, gee, I can create that. I can, I can make hair that looks like mine. So I'm looking forward to see what these kids can come up with. Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity to present. Wonderful. And thank you both for a fantastic session. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimilar.org. Following this session, the next session will begin at 4.30 p.m. in this keynote region and it's entitled, Cross College, Cross Pollen, When Professional and Virtual Worlds Collide. Now also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC20 poster expo in the OSCC expo three region to find accompanying information on presentations and to explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC expo two region, along with the sponsor and the crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC regions. Thank you again to our speakers and to you, the audience.