Students travel to Turkey for European ‘Virtual World' project
21 June 2012
Cardonald's HND Software Development and HND Networking students travelled to Istanbul in Turkey as part of European ‘Education in a Virtual World' project on Thursday 24 May.
Cardonald College Glasgow was the only college from Scotland to take part in the ‘Education in a Virtual World' project along with other colleges from England, Turkey and Finland.
The project is part of the Leonardo Programme and its objective was to determine if learning in a virtual world is more appealing for students. The project provided partners with an island in the leading 3D virtual world ‘Second Life' and tasked to interact with one another and create their own virtual world.
Students were then asked to take part in a live virtual fayre and were judged by Istanbul-based importer of Volkswagen cars, Dogus who selected a winning team from each European college. The winners from Cardonald College Glasgow were Miguel Landu, Steven MacFarlane, Rebecca McKenzie and Paul Fullerton who impressed judges with their ‘tartanizer' which was a chair and when an avatar (a graphical image that represents a person) sits on the chair turns their clothes tartan.
All the winners of the competition were invited to present their work at Sisli Vocational College in Istanbul - giving them the chance to meet their peers from the other countries (prior to the conference the partners had never met in person as all communication was through Second Life). The winners were also treated to a cruise down the Bosphorus river and a visit to the grand Blue Mosque.
Morag Robertson, Head of School Computing and Electronics at Cardonald College Glasgow, who headed the project for Scotland, commented: "I am so proud of our students' achievement in this project. They've all worked so incredibly hard - you would not believe the amount of time that was spent on programming. Everyone had a great time in Istanbul and our students were a credit to the College - particularly Steven who presented the ‘tartanizer' on behalf of Cardonald.
She added: "This programme was an excellent opportunity for students to develop their networking and graphic design skills. I'm really looking forward to working on our new project which will involve a games-based assessment and I'm hoping there will be even more countries involved next time."
The Leonardo Programme is part of the European Union's Lifelong Learning Programme and it supports UK vocational education and training (VET) organisations, staff and learners to work together with European partners to improve training, skills and employability.
