This site is an example of a way to combine storytelling and/or reading comprehension with a more interactive environment. You go to the magical town of Brigadoon and learn the story of some of its inhabitants. Along the way you get quizzed on what you've read. Kits are available for those interested in designing their own quests. I wish they had made the environment more interactive, so that one could explore the places referenced in the story.

Numbakulla: The Pot Healer Adventure Second Life Innovative Learning Environment SLurl: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Numbkulla/215/18/22 This is the kind of place that I imagined I would visit when I first signed up for Second Life. While Second Life itself may not be a game, it has massive potential to be a place where educational games can be embedded and hosted. The Pot-Healer Adventure is not an educational game per se, but a highly interactive quest that gets the player to explore and solve puzzles. However, it is one of the few environments I've found so far that has key elements that couldn't easily be reproduced as an Adobe Flash video. The game starts with a shipwreck, which has left debris strewn over land and floating in the sea. It's an intriguing beginning, and a nice device to allow the player to interact with nearly everything visible. At the start you can pick up a notebook, which keeps track of things you pick up in the game, and gives you hints about what to do. A notecard at the beginning tells players that they are to find out about a mysterious old civilization that a previous explorer is no longer able to investigate. I'm not sure how this environment itself could be used for educational purposes, but the way it has been designed could and should be adapted for other purposes. I imagine the explore-and-interact puzzle format to lend itself to teaching history, and anthropology. It would be a particularly good way to teach how historians gather evidence, and what they can learn from old diaries, work reports, and other documents. I am glad that I found this interesting environment, and hope to return and explore it some more. I think that it could serve as inspiration to others looking to create more interactive quest-type lessons.

I came across this while looking for murder mystery scavenger hunts in Second Life. "Virtually Dead" is a murder mystery novel that is partially set in Second Life. It is written by Scottish screenwriter and author Peter May. All the reviews on Amazon have been positive.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Meteora/177/163/27

Site Description:
NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This is the virtual home of a real location.

Overall impressions:
This is a beautiful looking site with some great ideas, but I feel like it could be made more effective with some additional explanations built into the interactivity. I felt like the whole environment was designed by people who were more familiar with making videos than interactive games or environments.

Things to see and do:

Hurricane Ride
The first thing I did at this location was ride a plane through a hurricane. It was nicely animated, and let you see what a hurricane would look like from the air. The churning vortex of the hurricane was well done. However, I kept expecting that there would be some text or narration giving me some insights into what I was seeing. There was a clickable information kiosk that one could look at before or after the flight, but it would have been nice to have something more embedded into the experience.

Plane Ride
After the plane ride, I climbed onto a weather balloon and was taken into the sky. This gave me a nice view of the island, but again, I hoped that the relevant information would be built into the ride, but it wasn't.

Particle Accelerator
The ride through the DOE particle accelerator was very visually impressive, and the most immersive of all the interactions that I engaged in at NOAA. Notecards did sometimes come up and explain things, but I didn't feel that I left this with a clear understanding of what the accelerator is used for. Anything I know about it I learned from outside reading, not as a result of the simulation.

Tsunami
FULL DISCLOSURE: I was unable to participate in this interaction within Second Life. I couldn't find it on the map, and each time I tried to use a kiosk to teleport there, Second Life crashed. Therefore, I had to view a video on youtube.

The tsunami demonstration was interesting, as you could see how the tide will recede from the beach before big waves hit. The youtube video did a good job of explaining how to tell if a giant wave could be approaching, and what you can do to avoid it.