And then there were walls!

The build has begun on the California State University, Los Angeles parcel of land in Second Life. This parcel of land will be created by the student’s in the EDIT 550 class. There are 16 students in class from various backgrounds and disciplines.

When the building project originally began, we were split into four groups to generate ideas as to what to build on our parcel. After each group presented their ideas and much debate, we agreed that we wanted an informal, hip meeting area for socializing, meeting, and talking with not only our classmates, but potentially others from all over the world. In this area, there was a discussion about having a small stage for performances by artists, poets, and musicians. Many people liked the idea of having art shows and an area for displaying information on various topics. We decided that our target audience was K-12 educators from variety of fields. We wanted to be able to offer classes, tutorials and trainings, especially to new Second Life residents.

At the team leaders meeting, it was decided that having one building would be best, a two-story building, coffee house with a large meeting room on the first floor and an art gallery on the second. XtremeSalsa Tigerpaw created four different floor plans for the class to pick. Great job XtremeSalsa!

On February 19^th, the class decided to follow Floor Plan A and divided again into groups. Gerdofal was designated as our project manager to oversee the entire process. There are 5 groups dedicated to different parts of building which are architects, carpenters, ambience, textures, and reporters.

On Saturday February 23^rd, the walls were created by Architects, Leftern, XtremeSalsa, and Barry. “The goal is to build the shell and lock it in place…walls, floors, and ceiling” said Leftern. The meeting lasted almost four hours. There were many walls and floors that were assembled, lengthened, shortened, moved around, and then were taken apart. There was a discussion about whether the walls should be curved or if it should have corners. Ultimately, the building ended up with corners. It was a very exciting experience to watch the architects construct the building’s shell. Our collective vision is being created. I am very eager to see how the rest of the groups begin to contribute and create their parts of the building.

Happy Building!

Ama Runningbear