[Opensim-users] Hosting your own sim -- no admin access

[Jeff Mao]

Please excuse the x-post

Greetings all,
This is sightly off-topic, but I figured this was a community that could help point me toward the people who could help me solve a challenge...here it is (this is a little long)...

In my real life, I work for the State of Maine, Department of Education, and I oversee the Maine Learning Technology Initiative. It is the United State's largest 1:1 student computing program. Currently, we have 70,000 users (students, teachers, and administrators) in grades 7-12. Annually, we host a student conference at the University of Maine. About 1000 kids attend annually, and it is a time for kids to share what they are doing and to learn from others -- all things that are powered by the fact that we have a unique scenario...every student has a State issued MacBook laptop computer.

Part of the day each year, we host an "ubër session" where all 1000 kids are in an auditorium together and do something that really demonstrates the power of the scale of the program. Last year, we played at www.freerice.com and in 45 minutes, the kids donated 2.4 million grains of rice to the World Food Program by answering vocabulary questions.

This year, we were thinking of doing a virtual world project. Here's what we were thinking...rather then attempt to set up enough servers for all the kids to login to a grid together (its already a challenge to create a wireless network that can host 1000 concurrent users in one auditorium), we were thinking that each student would host their own sim (the other benefit to this is that when they leave, they take their sim with them and can use it anytime anywhere). To connect the session to the larger theme of the student conference (STEM education) we are focusing on energy this year. The activity we wanted them to play with for the hour we have is to play with energy use. To do so, we wanted to preload the default avatar inventory with some scripted items like a plasma TV, toaster, microwave oven, etc. In addition, things like small windmills, solar panels, etc. The idea is to let the kids drag these items out into their world, and with a HUD of some sort, be able to monitor electrical use even with these items "off". And then be able to turn them on, and see what happens to their energy draw...add a solar panel, and see what it takes to offset their electrical use, etc.

None of that is hard except...hosting your own sim. We've looked at the opensim project, and it appears that their is potential here, and we're only at the start of investigating this...but here's our initial barriers:

1) The students are not administrators on their laptops, so the sim and any supporting frameworks (ie mono) need to be able to be installed into the user home directory without an administrator password.

2) How to set up a dynamic "map" so that once the 1000 kids each have a sim running, how to visit each other's sim?


So, the question for the wisdom of this group...anyone ever try anything of this sort? Anyone know who we should be talking to? Maybe someone at Linden Labs would be interested in playing with this with us? This event is scheduled for the end of May 2011, so that's our timeline for any development that we might need to get done to make this happen.

Thanks in advance for any wisdom you might have...

Jeff Mao
Learning Technology Policy Director
Maine Department of Education
jeff.mao at maine.gov
SL: Geoffrey Mayo
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