Beyond The Net
Whyville.com teaches adults joys of learning online
By Janine Warner
When members of the online community at Whyville.net were challenged with reporting on Winter Solstice celebrations around the world, many quickly determined that the best strategy was to recruit an international team and compare notes.
That wasn't so hard in a virtual world where 50 percent of the members come from outside the United States. The real challenge came when they wanted to celebrate their success and discovered they'd first have to learn to negotiate different time zones. Most of them are only 12 or 13, and they still have early bedtimes.
No one assigned the task of studying time zones, but then much of the learning that happens at Whyville isn't assigned. It's discovered.
That's just one of the secrets of success in this online learning environment that, despite being designed for kids, is getting attention from adults who hope to apply some of the lessons learned in Whyville to online communities for grown-ups.
Whyville.net is run by Numedeon Inc. and was started in 1999 by a small group of scientists, educators and Internet experts who wanted to create a place where young people could learn about science through experience, not just memorizing terms or blowing up beakers in a lab.
''The basic idea is that learning should involve the learner taking responsibility for the learning, not just being a vessel that you dump information into,'' said James Bower, a Ph.D. with more than 20 years of experience as a science educator and one of Whyville's founders.
If you want to motivate kids to learn (or anyone else for that matter), the best model is to provide them with real-world challenges, help them develop a sense of community, and let them figure out the answers for themselves, he added.
None of these are new ideas, but they certainly run counter to many commercial sites that are trying to attract kids on the Web. Whyville is not just about being entertained or playing games, it's about studying science, and it's attracting a growing audience.
Even the founders didn't expect traffic to reach 45 million page views a month with no advertising. (That's comparable to Discovery.com and Yahoo.games.) They also never predicted that 67 percent of Whyville's users would be girls, with an average age of 13.
Whyville is a three dimensional world where you can take a virtual bus around town, getting off at activity-filled places like the Center for Disease Control, the Currency Exchange or the House of Illusions. If you want something changed in Whyville, you can start a petition at City Hall. With enough votes, you can get your idea implemented.
The team that created Whyville now has a contract with the University of Texas to build a similar online community for faculty and students at the university's health-science center. Other organizations have also approached them about developing online learning communities for adults.
They have had to make some adjustments for older users, said Richard Kahlenberg, a former science and technology writer and another of Whyville's founders. For example, in the adult version, only one person can chat at a time.
''Adults panic if they have to read 15 chat bubbles at a time,'' he said. ``The kids can handle it because they're used to it.''
In Whyville, members create their own cartoon-like faces, which represent them when they move around the site. That's not unique online; many game sites feature some kind of image or avatar for members, but it is unusual in an educational site.
Another difference is that although you can decorate your face the way you might customize an avatar, you have to ''buy'' those decorations with ''clams,'' which you earn by solving science problems, getting published in the Whyville Times or developing a business in Whyville's burgeoning entrepreneurial environment. You can also use clams to buy or rent real estate and to purchase furniture to decorate your home.
The extent to which kids are learning business skills at Whyville is another development that's attracting attention from other sites.
''There are many places to learn about business on the Internet,'' Bower said. ``You can go and pretend to run a company, and at the end they rate you on how good you are. But that's pretend. In Whyville it's not a simulation. It's something they're really doing, and it turns out that the consequences of them doing it are real and immediate and they know if they did a good job because they made 1,000 clams.''
Funny, that seems like what motivates most people in the real world -- a sense of community, a chance to solve real problems and the opportunity to earn a few clams. No wonder so many other sites are trying to replicate their model.
First publication, The Miami Herald, May. 05, 2003
