Blogs

Workshop about VRML/X3D, virtual worlds, avatars and education:

JCDE 2012 is a conference and series of workshops about digital content in education. In this year's edition one of the workshops will be ABC 3D: Introduction to Generic 3D/VRML/X3D/Virtual Worlds and its Applications in Education. Essentially, we will showcase some pedagogical uses of VRML/X3D virtual worlds, introducing this technology to the conference's audience and demonstrating how to create avatars. Flying avatars, of course... enrollment is here: JCDE 2012.

Avatar Studio: teaching young children to create 3D avatars.

The arts department teachers from Agrupamento de Escolas Venda do Pinheiro organizes every year a day of workshops for every student. This year, parallel to a painting workshop and an immersive sensorial exploration, pupils visited and experimented with avatar creation in Avatar Studio.

Children with ages between 10 to 14 years old had the opportunity of working with the program, learning about avatar animation an the new avatar gestures, and even got a glimpse of the VRML code underlying the visual interfaces.

Avatars are important (they represent us in the scene) and can have very important roles in the joy we get from the 3D experience. One of the key aspects of SL promotion was the avatar system (on other systems too). With vrml/x3d similar things can be done (theoretically we have even better access and more control on this open technology).

Universidade Católica Portuguesa is launching a series of training courses for teachers and educators. One will be an introduction to VRML/X3D and some 3D applications, for any teacher who wishes to learn about educational potentials and have some hands-on introduction to these technologies.