Our demonstration was very simple. Dr. Nick and I introduced ourselves as a professor and student working on the OpenSim project. I logged into my OSgrid.org account, while Dr. Nick explained the idea behind open source software. Dr. Nick went on to describe the goals and importance of the project, while I did various things in the background.

The students seemed to enjoy several demonstrations over the others. Students were anxious to ask the all-knowing WikiLith questions, and while the WikiLith did not always return a correct answer, it was still fun to ask the all-knowing block about the meaning of life (among other things.) The room filled with “Wow!” and “Awesome!” as I lifted off the ground and fly to the video screens to demonstrate live video within the world. Finally, we’d stroll over to the weather maps to check out the radar to see if we could deduce what the weather would be like for their ride home.

A Q&A session followed the demonstration. The high school students would ask questions such as what our favorite languages were, how much the software cost, and where the software was available from. Many of them were curious if OpenSim could be used as a basis for their own games, specifically first-person shooters. We referred these students to the Quake 3 engine, because of the documentation available for budding hackers. There have also been quite a few variations on the engine which have improved on the engine, such as ioquake3. These questions would often lead the students to ask which game engine we preferred; Our choices were usually between the Unreal 3 engine developed by Epic Games and the Source engine developed by Valve. My background as a gamer and closet game developer served me well during this line of questioning. The middle school students asked far easier questions, such as why this project is useful and if I could land on various landmarks.

Overall, the students showed more interest in the OpenSim project than I expected. I consider the demonstration to be a success. I’m sharing this experience in hopes that it will inspire other members of the OpenSim community that are involved in higher education to use OpenSim to promote their own institution as well as the project.