14 year old English student Francesco has a dream of living in New York and working as a MOMA tour guide as he has a love of New York and modern art. Of course the first project that we thought of to learn new words and to practice his English conversation skills, was to create a tour of a local museum. The goal being to eventually give a guided tour, in English for his parents, friends and any other interested parties we could recruit. After much searching we found, or couldn’t find I should say, any type of gallery or art museum in our area! So we wrote to the NYC MOMA itself. We had hoped that they’d have a virtual online museum located somewhere on the web. They graciously responded that they didn’t as yet.

Discouraged but still determined, we came up with the idea of creating our own replica of the MOMA, as close as we could get anyway without ever having been there in person, and present a virtual guided tour from the web.

But first we had to build it!

An extraordinary amount of work, we started with one prim and created a building that somewhat resembled the museum. The work was very exciting! We decided 6 floors would take the rest of our lives to complete, and settled for 3 instead. Francesco chose colors and textures for the building and together, we added small details; railings, signs, food items in the food court, working computers in the media room, vases in the gift shops, working escalators, striving to make it as real and as interesting as possible. Later we researched what exhibitions and art pieces were currently being displayed in the museum, through the MOMA site. Francesco than had to find the images on the web, download them, than upload them into SL. We practiced his tour words, and any questions tourists might throw at him during his tour. Of course there was plenty to discuss and Francesco got an English language workout each week for about 4 months. He also learned quite a bit about the technology behind Secondlife and how to create and apply textures to 3D objects.

Francesco’s Apple Sketch

(You may recognize Francesco’s “Apple Sketch” from another post, although it was a completely different type of project at the time.)

MOMA Virtual Build

Two weeks before the completion of the museum, we invited his parents, friends and family. (His sister had a presentation as well on a different topic and you can see it here: “Tomorrows Dreams, Alice’s Wonderland” We were getting nervous, I had to hook up my computer to my larger television screen and hope that I’d connected all the wires correctly and pray that Secondlife would be up and running for his tour. In the end all the nerves were for nothing as everything worked beautifully and Francesco gave his guided tour through his MOMA to the delight of everyone attending!

We decided to document a little bit of his journey in hopes of inspiring others to teach through virtual worlds and to use your passion and imagination to share the English language!

If you you already use Secondlife and would like to use our build to teach your own students, please drop me an email and I’ll shoot you a copy!

email: leah.sillyfish@gmail.com

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