We received the news that the science-oriented virtual environment Rocket World will be made available for free to attendees at the 2010 Immersive Education Summit in Boston from April 23-25. Rocket World is an "immersive learning framework" for teaching STEM
(science, technology, engineering, math) content to students using a variety of tools including "virtual worlds, simulators, learning games, and mixed
(augmented) reality." Attendees at the Summit will be trained in how to :
- "Install Rocket World and other virtual worlds behind their firewall, for private, security, and cost-free immersive learning experiences"
- "Access and teach using freely available instances of Rocket World already installed on the Education Grid"
- "Copy or move any Second Life islands, regions, parcels and objects that they own onto private, security and freely available open source virtual world servers"
Sounds like quite an attractive offer for any educational institution interested in exploring using virtual worlds for science or math education. Although without having access to the virtual world, and no images or videos available, it's hard to evaluate how attractive the offer really is. The only image available is this somewhat dated looking Rocket World logo shown above, which does not appear to be an inworld screenshot.
See the official IES site for more information.
