Lessons learned implementing an educational system in Second Life

Second Life is an online 3D virtual environment that offers interesting potential for use in education due to its widespread availability, flexibility, and its use of standard platforms and input devices. Given a broad design brief for a nine-week masters’ student project of using Second Life for education, we explored a range of potential ways of using the environment, and designed and implemented a 3D turtle-graphics system. In this paper we present our findings together with a reflection on both the constraints that Second Life places on the range of educational uses worth pursuing, and the specific issues likely to be faced by researchers creating other such systems.