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Abstract
Virtual world platforms such as Second Life have been successfully used in educational contexts to motivate and engage learners. This article reports on an exploratory workshop involving a group of high school students using Second Life for an urban planning project. Young people are traditionally an under‐represented demographic when it comes to participating in urban planning and decision‐making processes. The research team developed activities that combined technology with a constructivist approach to learning. Real‐world experiences and purposes ensured that the workshop enabled students to see the relevance of their learning. Our design also ensured that play remained an important part of the learning. By conceiving of the workshop as a ‘serious playground’, we investigated the ludic potential of learning in a virtual world.
Acknowledgements
This research is supported under the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding scheme (project number LP0882274). Associate Professor Marcus Foth is the recipient of a Smart Futures Fellowship supported by the Queensland State Government and National ICT Australia. The authors would like to thank our partner organisations: the Regional Council, the local high school and the Lower Mill Site Board, for supporting this research project, as well as Jeremy Hunsinger and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. Special thanks to Ross Brown and Rune Rasmussen at QUT, and Andrew Jeffrey at the Apple University Consortium, for their technical support.