Interview with Metaverse Journal about The Lab

We were fortunate enough to do an interview with the Metaverse Journal's David Holloway about The Lab;

http://www.metaversejournal.com/2011/06/19/the-lab-virtual-worlds-learning-at-its-very-best/

Next holiday sessions announced

Session five

This week went very well, we had kids dancing to youtube, playing minecraft together, and exploring arduino kits which was new and quite a success. It is taking less effort every week.

Some images.

Last night's session

Yesterday we had a calmer session than usual - three of the kids were away, as were Dale and Trish.

Worth noting was the way all the four participants were getting on and interacting, talking firstly about Minecraft then about themselves - their ages, what grade they were in at school etc. There were quite a few questions of each other, showing a growing interest in the other kids, which is quite exciting to observe, especially for these kids who largely don't have friends or interests in peers' lives.

Everyone seemed very comfortable and relaxed in the space - it felt and sounded like any other group of kids. I'm guessing that the very presence of techie guys had a lot to do with it - they are guys who have demonstrated to the kids that they somehow 'get' them and their interests, and that they are around, ready to help but not pushing either.

Enquiries: the demand is obviously there

For the last few weeks since the media stories about The Lab in The Age, local papers and more recently ABC Radio, I have been receiving a steady stream of enquries from parents about The Lab. This is noteworthy because none of the stories had our contact details - people have found out about us and contacted us independently. I would say that I have had an average of one enquiry a day. The Lab now has a waiting list of 12 - enough for another group or two already. I've received enquiries from Melbourne, the Sunshine Coast, Perth, Tasmania, and one from the US. I think we're definitely onto something important here.

Trying to get sponsorship so we can get the kids new laptops

One issue we had on Thursday was the participants computers.

Half of them crashed running programs like minecraft or spore(including one of our dells), which are not very intense games. They would have no chance of running something like Opensim. Not many of them were actually capable of running two screens either. Very few if any of them would be capable of doing something like video editing. Most looked like old work laptops from a parent.

The laptops we have are on their last legs. Two crash regularly.

One other issue with us helping was that many of the PCs were running XP or vista, meaning that for on young person it took us half an hour to get her computer online(we still don't know why) and for many others using the dual screen or installing software was more painful than it could be.

Today I contacted the following companies asking them for support;

1. NEC
2. IBM
3. Fujitsu
4. Steelseries
5. Razor
6. Dick Smith
7. Harvey Norman
8. Apple
9. Asus
10. Officeworks
11. Pioneer Computers
12. Logitech

Our first official session - success

On Thursday we held our first official session.

We were expecting 8 kids, we got 7, a couple couldn't make it because of the torrential rain, and we got one extra younger brother.

We were lucky enough to have ABC radio come along and cover the event live, a podcast of this is online here.

All of the young people seemed to have a good time, many ended up playing minecraft together, they also played spore, and one young lady started to learn web design.

All of the parents and participants seemed very positive about proceedings.

Our website is also finally online at http://www.thelab.org.au.

Here is the room finally in action.

Second intro session, April 23

Our second intro session last Saturday was if anything more successful than the first, even given the initial logistical glitches such as the campus being officially closed for Easter and the very grumpy security guard showing his displeasure at having to open up the lab and lifts for our group (even though we had booked). Of particular note was:

- signs of communication and interaction between participants, especially some with whom we've worked before and for whom this was a first;

- Trish's excellent coordination and support work with the parents

We're on track now to run the first weekly sessions on a Wed or Thurs afternoon after school, starting the second week of May.

Here are some photos that Dale took:

Images from our first session

Some images from our first session.

One of our teen mentors doing some 3d design.

One participant exploring Second Life.

A couple of the mentors and a couple of participants.

One participant playing a flash game.

An overview of the room used, it's 16 floors up on Flinders St.

First introductory session, 16 April - some observations

Set in the relatively slick surrounds of the gaming lab at VU's Flinders St campus, our first session is underway as I write. So far, so good - participants seem to be engaged with a variety of technologies: Second life (for the building of avatars and environments), Spore, Minecraft (a new discovery...kind of a cross between a first person game and a virtual world involving mining, costs $15 to buy and install on a server - thanks Sean for installing it), Crayon Physics, Flash games - and in one case, looking at the bones of the technical setup of the lab including shared drives, registry keys etc.

Almost everyone showed up bar one (and a couple of Gippslanders who will be coming next week)

We have five paid mentors in the room - Dale, Craig, Justin, Sean and Tung - plus Nathan as a peer mentor.


The mood is quiet, calm, and positive, with everyone seemingly into what they're doing and quite a bit of discussion between participants, mentors and parents.