SC Field Trip: Scientia

Our field trip this week is to Scientia, our nearest neighbor in Second Life.  

Scientia is the new name for Virtech, the virtual presence of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).  

We will arrive at the Scientia Central Plaza to begin our field trip: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Scientia/128/128/31

From the region’s website at https://virtual.caltech.edu/virtech

Scientia “is an experimental platform for online education, operated by the Virtual Reality Lab, which is a part of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery at Caltech.  It was designed to furnish the Caltech community with an alternative to in-person interactions during the pandemic. Through the use of avatars, participants can visit a rich virtual space furnished to enable engaging experience as well as seamless social interaction. It is open to all members of the Caltech community and their approved guests, as well as the members of other academic communities by a special arrangement.”

From https://virtual.caltech.edu/virtech/virtech-and-second-life

“Caltech uses Scientia to experiment with various combined technologies for online learning, and virtual teaching labs in particular. A general consensus is that using  virtual worlds for education can lead to better learning outcomes, as the students find the lectures and demonstrations more engaging and more memorable than those delivered through a standard video (e.g., YouTube) or conferencing (e.g., Zoom) platforms. VWs also provide a channel for the human interaction component of the learning process (both student to student and student to instructor) that is clearly superior to other online mechanisms such as the discussion threads, social media posts, or video conferencing, and that is their major strength. While such interactions are obviously not as good as those in the physical reality, they can be pretty close, once the participants get used to the platform and identify with their avatars.”