Quick Note

In order to see the pictures better, click on them. You will be taken to a new page where the image will be much bigger, and the words will be readable.

Whyville MAP

Forums and Chatting

Chatting away at the beach. Random people asking each other questions and boasting about snow days.

The forums where questions are asked and questions are answered.

Games

The Scion Driving School. Here is a game kids can play to increase their salary of clams.

Here is a list of all of the fun games to play.

The Chat License Process

If someone is rude or mean to you, vaporize them! Then you no longer will see them or hear what they have to say, and they will no longer see you!

It is okay to ask and answer the question a/s/l? Telling someone your age, sex and location (very broadly) is safe information to share.

If anyone asks for specific information about where you live or what your name is, report it immediately! This is an appropriate use of the 911 report.

Focus in on Chatting and Forums

Forums

I think these forums are great places for kids to get an idea of how these venues are used on the greater World Wide Web. I know I have checked out forums many times in my own personal experience to answer random questions from “what is wrong with my ’98 Toyota Sienna” to “how do I defeat Sepheroth in FFVII.” Kids should be aware of these resources the internet has to offer, and the Whyville forums are a nice safe way to introduce the concept to children.

On Whyville itself, from all of the forums I read through, they seemed pretty clean. The topics ranged from books to science to beauty to sports and outdoors. Some of the forums in the Health and Body portion were about puberty, and I know that can be a touchy subject, but there weren’t any totally inappropriate comments.

There was one forum on books. The kids were actually posting back and forth about what they thought of books and questions they had. I thought that was pretty neat. I actually saw a pretty hilarious forum going on about Twilight, but there were also forums on more normal kid books such as Bridge to Terabithia.

Chatting

The way that chat is incorporated into Whyville amazes me. Not only can you go to certain areas and chat with other kids, but you can also type in certain phrases to accomplish tasks.

The chatting with people is pretty neat because you can type directly into your talk bubble. If you are caught being inappropriate by either a City Worker or a fellow civilian, you will lose your chatting privileges. I tried the chatting, but I felt slightly creepy being so old. So I settled on doing some observations of the types of conversations being had in various chat settings. It reminded me of the early AIM days before the really creepy people came out in full force. I always thought it was really cool to chat with someone from Texas or some other state randomly via the internet. It was a great opportunity for me to ask how they lived and discover similarities and differences. Also, chatting has admittedly contributed to my typing speed. I don't think I would have ever learned to type as fast as I do now if I had not started using Gmail's Chat and various other platforms before that. So chatting has the potential to increase student familiarity with the keyboard and provide motivation for honing their typing skills.

Using chat to accomplish tasks and get goodies is another way that this instant messaging idea is incorporated into Whyville. Like I said in a previous post, once an avatar learns a dance at the Dance Studio, that avatar can perform that dance anywhere they could normally chat. All a student has to do to make the avatar dance is type in the key words, if they can remember them. Also, when clams are being spent, the chat process is used to verify that the buyer does indeed intend to make a purchase.

Activities in Whyville

Here are some of the engaging ways that kids can become more digitally literate while having fun. I know that the drive to win clams motivated me to figure out the sometimes complicated controls.

Scion Driving School

I drove a car using my arrow keys. For the first task I had to drive to a checkered square and then stop; doing this increased my salary by 2 clams. Yay!

The next stage is avoiding trees, then it is staying on a road, next staying on a road with curves, and the last one I did was staying in the right hand lane. A neat little driving school within Whyville.

Cafeteria

Trash Game

This game is all about sorting discarded objects into recyclable or trash. There are four bins. Kids have to put the objects in the correct bin out of these four choices: glass, paper, plastic, trash. Hey! I earned 9 clams for playing the game twice. That’s pretty sweet!

Food Sort

The task is to put food away in the kitchen storage area. Food is dry, refrigerated, or frozen. The refrigerated food needs to be sorted between produce, meat and dairy. The dry foods need to be put on the shelf alphabetically.

With both activities it is interactive because other avatars are cleaning up or stocking shelves right alongside you. It is a team effort, and everyone gets rewarded with clams in proportion to how much they contributed.

Bioplex

Vaccine Lab

I still have not figured out this yet. I think I have to find viruses first, then I can find vaccines for them.

Virus Lab

Unfortunately my internet failed every time I tried to do any of the activities in this part of Whyville. From the description though, I can tell that the science is pretty detailed which I think is great!

C.A.R.E Lobby

Habitat Creator

The object of this game is to put the right objects in animal cages. There is a timer, and the goal is to make as many cages ready to be inhabited by an animal before the timer runs out. The possible cages are: frog, rat, pidgeon, fish, and pig. Again, like in the cafeteria, the job is completed with other players, and clams are earned proportionally.

AALAS Solitaire

Here the goal is to sort cards to match a disease and an experimental process to research the disease. I was given HIV and then muscular distrophy. For each I had to match the appropriate Vehicle, Experiment, and Impact card to the disease in question. Kids can learn how research is done and how it impacts the world.

Critter Care

This game is tricky! Kids have to use their critical thinking skills in order to be successful. I tried taking care of the fish; it was a disaster. There are four tanks, and you need to read the records, feed the fish, clean the tank, possibly change the water filter, and then tag the tank with a red or green tag. The red tag is to signal that the fish might not be okay, and the green tag is to signal that the fish is doing fine. The tag part is the complicated part. If a fish’s tank is dirty, yet the tank had been cleaned in the last day, then they might be sick, so the tank needs a red tag. Also, if the fish’s tank is clean and the tank hasn’t been cleaned recently, then that tank needs a red tag as well. There are other tricky circumstances as well, but those are just two of the reasons I failed to successfully care for the fish.

Bankinter

Here is a place where kids can put their clams into a savings account. This is great to get kids thinking about saving money in the 'real world'. If students want to put clams in a CD account, then they need to have at least 500 clams that they are ready to deposit. Unfortunately, I have nowhere near enough clams to do this….

Dance Studio

Here kids pay clams to learn a dance. To learn the dance, you make vectors on a coordinate plane that match the path already laid out. Then you pick how long you will pause at each step. When you have the timing and placement right, then you “learn” the dance. Now your avatar can spontaneously dance anywhere chatting is allowed. All you have to do is type in “dance shuffle” or “dance cancan” (depending on the dance you learned), and then to stop you have to simply type in “dance stop.” Also, in general to confirm purchases, you need to type in “pretty please” to confirm your purchase. Isn't that a pretty cool integration of the chat function into Whyville life?

My First Day in Whyville

Okay. I am registered as mcalpi14 on Whyville. I created a cute little avatar just for me, and I am ready to be a citizen. My first stop is in the Welcome Lounge to get my Chat License. I am not sure what the chatting is, but a license sounds important, so I better get one.

………later on………..

So, getting a chat license is Whyville’s way of making sure that each person knows the rules of chatting and knows what to do if someone violates the rules. Apparently no private information is to be shared, and the avatars for the Whyville employees have beanies. I like this chat licensing feature. It explains their standards in a clear fashion and provides kids with ways to handle unsafe chatting. If I had my class doing this I would make it kind of a class responsibility to report any offenders on the site and explain how it takes everyone to make a community safe. This is a great launching point for a class discussion on internet safety. I would want to focus on what information we share and do not share, why it is important not to share personal information, and what our classroom consequences will be if someone is caught using the internet in an unsafe way.

As a side note, I do recognize that internet safety is a huge concern when using this type of program, but I feel that the fact that Whyville is a semi-controlled environment makes it an ideal place for kids to get their feet wet in the internet world. It’s my opinion that talking about the issue and teaching kids how to safely use the internet is a much better course of action than hyper-censoring kids’ internet experiences.