 Welcome to the 1.30pm to 2.00pm session of the 2016 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 and comments to atopensimcc with the hashtag OSCC16. In this session, we're happy to introduce a terrific presentation called Spanish Language Learning at Escape Using Virtual Worlds to Teach Language. Our speakers today are James Abraham and Martha Leno. James will be speaking first. James has been working in virtual worlds since 2006 as Callisto in Senial in Second Life, and he can correct that when he begins speaking. He created Mycasa Esucasa, an immersive interactive Mexican village with realistic buildings and over 25 learning activities. Since 2007, James has taught a college-level Spanish course in Second Life every semester, but is now exploring opportunities in Open Simulator. Martha 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. Thank you, Kay. Thank you, everyone. Can everyone hear me okay? Just give me a yes in the chat if you can hear me. Great. Perfect. So we really appreciate you taking a little bit of time out of your busy schedule to hear about our project at Spanish Language Learning at Escape. Eugenia and I have been teaching in Second Life for a long time, and we've kind of had both of our feet in Second Life, One Foot in Second Life, One Foot in Open Sim, and we've kind of now just recently taken that one foot off Second Life and put all of our weight into Open Sim and continue our development in, we're using DigiWorld as our platform, and we've gone to create a Mexican village that's loosely based on San Miguel de Allende. I'm in Arizona and Eugenia's in Mexico, so we have our great team format she can provide on the ground information for me and correct all my mistakes and what I'm working on and she is using my build. I do most of the scripting and creating and the graphics and everything. You can see a little slide of the overview up here of what Escape looks like. And please, we want to take this opportunity to encourage you to come and visit us. It's hard to explain in 20 minutes what we all have to offer, so please jot down that hypergrid address and come for a visit where you can do a little bit more exploring. So like I said, I do the scripting and Eugenia is in charge of the cultural activities and has a student that come and visit. I bring my college students from Glendale Community College in Arizona and she's a private language instructor and brings her students in. So first I wanted to talk about what is Escape? And Escape is obviously an Open Sim environment that has 30 unique locations and I want to give you a website. You can take a quick browse at the different locations. I'm going to type it into the chat. If you just want to open that up, you can browse through the list of locations, pretty much all the classic things that you would find in a Mexican or Hispanic town. And within each of those locations are embedded learning activities, which you would cover in a basic Spanish beginning Spanish class college level. And the great thing is with Open Sim, this would work for a high school environment too, because it's pretty much the same information. You learn the colors or the alphabet and any language class that you take at the beginning. So this is a great platform for high school students, college students, really any age, that's the great thing that I found. It's an advantage for high schools and even middle schools to have that closed garden. And so our idea eventually is to market this for private or for schools to use on their own closed garden servers. Right now, escape is open to the public and you can go in and have a visit and walk around and complete the activities. So we also have cultural exhibitions and events. It's, I would say, John, it's a very general Spanish. It's geared for middle of the road. And within each of the white activities are the areas we have 300 learning activities and we're growing. I'm building these all the time. I think it's come up before that we can't compete with the big platform or the council games because they just have so many developers. At this point, it's me developing all the activities. I'm doing the 3D modeling. I'm doing the graphics and the scripting and the content. I'm a content expert. I'm actually a Spanish language professor. So it's kind of a self-learned thing. And so the progress is slow, but it keeps moving forward. We've been working at it for a long time. We have integrated NPCs. We have both static and interactive. I'm going to talk about those in a minute. And then we have include a variety of media types. We'll show you videos, their videos playing, their sound files playing all over the place. And then we have a HUD. That's kind of a student aid that I'll talk about a little bit more down the road to. And yeah, we do do we encourage English and non English speakers to mingling. We'd love to get more traffic so we could have more of that. And our cultural activities sneak, we do do that kind of stuff. Yep. We're looking to generate more traffic, so that's why I really appreciate your ears listening and hopefully we'll be able to generate some momentum. So here's an example of a couple of the learning activities. And you can see the one in the upper left is for conjugating the air verbs. And what you have to do is that balloon that you see is growing. And you have to click it, you have to conjugate a verb. And then that makes the balloon go up into the air. And if you don't do it in time, it explodes. So we want to kind of integrate gaming aspects into it. And that green ball that you see on the right side of next to the utmost is kind of the controller. So all of our activities have these green ball controllers that you'll see. So you walk around, you see that green ball, you click on it. It's going to ask you something or, you know, ask you what you want to do. So you see the clothing activity there. So you go into a clothes store and you walk around. And that's mostly vocabulary acquisition. So you're going to walk in there and we'll talk about in a minute the different stages of learning. But that's what an activity would look like. So you're in the environment and then you participate in the learning process. So right up the bat, you can probably just scrolling through that list of locations. See, obviously role playing is huge here. So for more advanced students, you can role play easily in this environment. So it has that aspect. My interest is in the lower level, the acquisition, the practice. And then here you see in the third graphic there on that page is my alphabet activity. So you click on those and you'll hear the sound and then you'll hear the word and then it'll ask you to click on or whatever letter it is. And so there's games integrated into that. So good. So here's what the philosophy that we kind of use for our activities. We have three stages of learning. So each one of those green balls, you'll click on it and there'll be a space for acquiring knowledge. Then there'll be a place to practice and then there'll be a place to assess that knowledge. And you'll see, if you see on the left, aprender is to learn in Spanish. And that's the learning. So that would walk you through the vocabulary. Or it'll give you a note card and explain a verb conjugation to you or how to use the subjunctive or whatever it is. The second, the practice is práctica. And here you get to practice as much as you want. It'll take you through practice activities and you earn XP points. So down the road we'll integrate a store system where you can use those XP, a student can use those XP points to buy clothing, buy right answers, whatever it is that's still being developed. And then the third one is the examin where there's a set store of answers and you have to get them all correct. We believe in mastery learning. So you have to get 100% to be able to get credit for that activity. So all of these activities have constant feedback. That ball will turn red if you get a wrong answer. You'll hear the boo sound if you get a wrong answer. You'll hear clapping if you get it right. And they work through the activities, work through recognition and production. So the first práctica or exam will just be recognizing the right word. And you'll just have to say if it's right or wrong or click on it. And then the second activity will be actually producing that word. So it'll say what's the word or the shirt will light up in the store, the t-shirt. And then you have to type in the word for t-shirt in Spanish. The great thing is all the questions are randomized. So you can come back another time and it'll be a different set of questions for you. So you can get as much practice as you want. And then all the results are stored into a database. So teachers can track how their students are doing it. And actually, students can track that. And they can actually see what activities they've completed. Let's see, clicked a little bit ahead there. Go back. So our NPC use, we have static MPs. So you'll see these mesh avatar or NPCs here. And here in the plaza, for example, they are asking you a question. You see that green text in the lower right picture. If you zoom in, you'll see the one male student is saying mucho gusto. So if you click on him, it would ask you in a dialog box, how would you respond if someone said to you mucho gusto? And you have to click the right answer. It gives you four. I think it's multiple choice question. You have to click the right one and then you get the feedback. And then whenever you come by again, it won't ask you. You won't see that again. So the idea is once you master that, now they're just there. They're not asking you any questions. And within this plaza, there are 10 of those static questions, 10 or 11 of those static questions. In the upper left, this is a clothing activity. So you click on somebody that's wearing a red top or a red, or I'm sorry, it's orange, orange shirt. So you have to go around and walk and look around. And then, oh, I see this person in the left. This woman is wearing a orange top. So you click on her and it recognizes that you've clicked on the right one and you get credit. So you are learning the closed vocabulary by seeing what they're wearing. And there's also a biography activity in this space where they each have a biography and they ask you questions. They tell you their story and then you have to answer questions about their biography. The next type of NPC is we use the open sim moving NPCs, the scripted NPCs. And obviously those of you that script know they're a little bit more involved but there are so many great tools out there. And other people that have made simple models that you can just tweak them. I'm kind of, that's how I learned HTML was just by going to a webpage that I liked and tweaking the HTML. That's kind of how my LSL, my linen scripting language progressed. So the great thing is Outworlds for NAND has some great scripts that you can copy or just the LSL. Wickey, you can tailor those scripts to do what you want. So this activity actually is a waitress. So you go in a cafe and she greets you and then she has you sit down and then in the lower right you can see she presents you with a menu and she asks what you want and you have to click on the item that you want from the dialogue box and then she'll bring it to you. They actually pop up on the table. Whatever you order, they're all hidden there. They just, they're not showing. So when you order what she brings you what you order, they'll magically appear on the table. And so that's a lot of fun. It adds a lot more sense of interaction. And we've heard complaints about Second Life and OpenSim that they're not inhabited. I think these NPCs bring that presence that a lot of virtual worlds are lacking. So it feels like there are people around all the time. There's NPCs throughout the sim and they're asking you questions, greeting you and you can interact with them. I think that's, yep. Me for a minute, Eugenia, do you wanna step in? Yes, of course. Well, okay. We were talking about immersion. One of the conditions to get the language is immersion and as we do in real life, because I teach Spanish in real life, one of the conditions is immersion. That way we organize event, we organize cultural activities in real life and we create cultural exhibition, et cetera. That the same we do in virtual worlds. I work in Second Life and now in digital world with James. And in both worlds, I have created, to get that immersion, I have created cultural activities and parties. Why not? Parties are important also. As you can see on the picture, we have some photos of the activities we have organized in escape, in our sim in escape. As we invite you to visit us, we have not only the activities have talked James, we have cultural exhibition, parties and more cultural activities. On the picture, you can see picture about Mexican independence. The picture of Miguel Hidalgo, that Miguel Hidalgo is Professor James. We perform the character of the activities and well, that is the idea. As we do in real life, we play also, we make some plays also. Dia de los Muertos, of course, Day of the Dead. Christmas season on Christmas season, we have an exhibition of information about Christmas season in Mexico. The piñatas, the posadas we organize in real life. Well, the idea is to copy, to recreate that activities on virtual world. We have specifically Casa de la Cultura, if you can see on the picture. In Casa de la Cultura, we have that cultural exhibition. We have the Holy Week information, the Day of the Dead exhibition. Christmas time, Christmas season also. And we organize parties, of course, parties. Why parties? Well, because we need social activities. Our students can come to the parties and that parties we chat in Spanish, we can practice the language. Me, like a teacher, I have to write correctly, Spanish, that way students can see the conjugation, for example, the way we use the tenses. And maybe some slang, why not? Yeah, with our advanced students, they practice their slang. And well, sometimes we say some bad words, but of course we explain what is the meaning of that bad words. We don't want to insult anybody, but we can discover that kind of cultural mind of Latin. And well, that is the idea of the cultural activities. And we get the immersion. As we do in real life, we put together as teacher with the student and we talk. And yeah, exactly. And we talk, we talk and we see what happened. Well, in virtual world, we have a lot of tools to get that immersion, that real life inside a second life. And that way we learn, we get the language. Also, we get the presence in the world, not only with the, well, like Professor James said, the NPCs, we, our avatars, our avatars inside, we get that immersion, that presence in the world. We, as you can see in my photo, day of the exhibition, I was with my student. We were at Casa de la Cultura. We were talking, we were changing his opinion about that activity, Day of the Dead. And that way, we practice, of course, we practice grammar with the activities in escape, but only with conversation, with our chat inside the world. Thank you, thank you very much. Yeah, James, can you, can you come, can you continue? Yep, yep, we'll just finish up, I think our time's just about done, but we'll be both in our expo, we're in booth number seven over in the expo, Sim. And just a little quick, you can look at this slide real quick of our learning aids, so we have a HUD. And then we have a personal assistant, that little robot pops up an NPC that follows you around and the idea will be that, it will be your guide. It will tell you, when you're playing a video game and you have that guide telling you where to go and what to do, that'll be your mother chasing after you, telling you how to let you need to study more. It'll be Elhani or I chasing after you, telling you you need to study your verbs more, your vocabulary. No, it's actually all scripted, so it'll be fun. Thank you, James and Martha for a terrific presentation. 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 2 p.m. in this keynote region and is entitled Applications for Expanding the Design Space. Also, we encourage you to visit the poster Expo booth as James suggested and also take a look at the hypergrid tour resources on the Expo 2 region. And then sponsor and crowd funder booths are located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. Again, thank you to our speakers and the audience and I think for just a few more minutes, there can be some questions and answers in the chat, so.