At the 7th workshop held last December, we held a quiz competition by soliciting questions for a 4-question quiz from children in advance via Google Form. The number of quiz questions exceeded our expectations, with 51 questions being collected, resulting in a 5-round quiz competition, making this the most exciting workshop (I feel it became so) among the workshops we have conducted since last year.
This is an interesting and difficult part of workshops in the metaverse, as we can only see how the children are doing through their avatars, and this is just a feeling. By creating a quiz in advance, and having the children participate in the workshop while wondering where the quiz would take them, they may have been able to participate in the workshop with a greater awareness of the workshop as their own personal affair than before.
This time, we again selected 10 questions from the list and gave them to the participants.
After that, we created artworks on the theme of this year’s goals using blocks of various shapes and colors that we had prepared in advance on Google Slides. Using the collaborative editing feature on the slides, all participants accessed the same slide. Each person decides on his or her own page, writes his or her name, and works on it.
We started by making ducks with six blocks and then went on to create artwork with 23 blocks of various shapes, sizes, and colors. The blocks can be angled, overlapped in any way, and changed in size and shape, giving more freedom than activities using actual blocks (the balance between freedom and constraint was also considered while watching the children’s activities).
Since being involved in this project, I have been thinking about how to communicate with participants in the metaverse space through workshops.
In the workshop using Scratch, the programs created by participants were projected on a screen in a room in the metaverse to share their work with the participants. In addition, in this activity using Google Slides, not only can the work be projected on the screen and shared in the same way, but since the same slides are being edited together, participants can go and see the slides that other participants are making at any time they like.
But in any case, the main communication with participants is to comment on their work as they view it. Of course, you can talk via voice chat or send text messages to each other, but this may not be a good fit for communication in a workshop in a metaverse space.
Metaverse space is designed to be similar to the real world, but whether or not we communicate (or want to) in the same way as in the real world may be a different question.
How can each participant in the metaverse space enjoy the activities and learning in the workshop in a communication method that suits him or her? We would like to continue to think about how to design and support workshops in the future.
I also feel that there are some hints in the quizzes we collected beforehand.
Through each workshop in the metaverse, I have been given the opportunity to think about workshops in the metaverse. I would like to thank the students who participated and the teachers of the Ehime Prefectural Board of Education for their support!