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  • 2007 Serious Games Summit GDC: Jane McGonigal On ilovebees, ARGs This latest Serious Games Source feature covers a keynote by alternate reality game creator Jane McGonigal presented during the recent 2007 Serious Games Summit, during which she stated “I design games from the future,” and offered insight into the creation of Halo 2 ARG ilovebees.
  • Serious Game Engine Shootout In the march up to the Serious Games Shootout panel to take place in March during the Serious Games Summit in San Francisco, writer Richard Carey presents a comparative analysis of several prominent engines currently used for developing serious games, as well as quotes from the companies behind the technologies.
  • Playing with Fire: Enemy Dolls In this latest Playing with Fire feature, Powerful Robot Games' Gonzalo Frasca offers his unique insight into the perception of conflict in games, as well as in other media, and notes how looking at events through the eyes of the opposition could lead to better understanding.
Second Life Classrooms Get New Open-Source Toolset[04.08.09]

Founders of the SLOODLE project have announced the release of SLOODLE version 0.4, a toolset that will assist educational presentations in Linden Lab's virtual world application Second Life. The project integrates Second Life's classroom areas with Moodle, an open-source e-learning environment.

With SLOODLE, educators in Second Life will use a web-based interface to prepare classroom materials and transfer them to Second Life for lectures and presentations. Students can use SLOODLE to organize class projects and send Second Life screen captures to their classroom blogs.

SLOODLE founders Jeremy Kemp and Dr. Daniel Livingstone note that similar virtual world toolsets are used in training applications at IBM and Sun Microsystems. SLOODLE, however, is the first such solution aimed specifically at public school teachers.

"It's been exciting working at the forefront of the interface between established, proven web-based technologies and new and innovative 3D approaches to eLearning," said Livingstone. "We've made fantastic progress in the last few months, and this new release of SLOODLE has some major improvements that will help make life a lot easier for many educators and tutors using Second Life."

SLOODLE is funded by the not-for-profit IT services group Eduserv. The toolset is free for use under the GNU GPL license.

By Danny Cowan
April 8, 2009 12:23:00 PM PT