(ISF) Gaming engine suggestions for education

The River City project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is looking for suggestions on how we can find developers to help us port River City to a new platform. River City is a 3D multi-user virtual environment for teaching middle school science. Students visit a virtual town during several time periods in the 1800s and try to figure out what's causing the residents to get sick. Students walk around the town, look at and click on objects, talk to characters, and communicate with their teammates. The program interfaces with a web-based guide that provides instruction, data collection, and a saved notebook of student work. For an overview of River City, visit http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject/index.html

River City was first developed in 2000, and uses the ActiveWorlds engine. We need to move to something that can support a larger user base (potentially thousands of students around the country), be multi-platform (Mac and PC), and allows scripting of game actions and events. We also need something with support for common mesh formats for models, and ideally, that has source included. River City is an educational application; we don't necessarily need the most high-performance, physics-based engine, but we do need something usable in a school-based setting. Our budget is also based on non-profit, educational research funds. The goal is to have something ready for fall 2008.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions on platform or know of developers who might be interested in working with us. Thanks!
- Shari ( sharimet%40gmail.com">sharimetgmail.com)

Shari J. Metcalf, PhD, Researcher
Professor Chris Dede, Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Shari,

I would take a look at Multiverse - http://multiverse.net/licensing/licensing-faq.jsp?cid=4&scid=3 It is free as long as you are not charging for usage or selling ad space.

What I find intriguing about their model is that it is the same client for all worlds built on their software and that the user can log into any world on their network without changing clients. (They say that developers can arrange to not be in their network). I could imagine a network of educational worlds built by different groups but made very accessible by a single client application.

regards,
peter
Free Flow Data
peter.davis%40freeflowdata.com">peter.davisfreeflowdata.com

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>>The River City project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is looking for suggestions on how we can find developers to help us port River City to a new platform. River City is a 3D multi-user virtual environment for teaching middle school science. Students visit a virtual town during several time periods in the 1800s and try to figure out what's causing the residents to get sick. Students walk around the town, look at and click on objects, talk to characters, and communicate with their teammates. The program interfaces with a web-based guide that provides instruction, data collection, and a saved notebook of student work. For an overview of River City, visit http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject/index.html River City was first developed in 2000, and uses the ActiveWorlds engine. We need to move to something that can support a larger user base (potentially thousand s of students around the country), be multi-platform (Mac and PC), and allows scripting of game actions and events. We also need something with support for common mesh formats for models, and ideally, that has source included. River City is an educational application; we don't necessarily need the most high-performance, physics-based engine, but we do need something usable in a school-based setting. Our budget is also based on non-profit, educational research funds. The goal is to have something ready for fall 2008. Please let me know if you have any suggestions on platform or know of developers who might be interested in working with us. Thanks!>;>

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