Five to seven schools each in Germany, England, Greece and Finland will be participating in the developmental phase.
Students can meet in virtual rooms, talk and play with each other.
For this purpose, each child selects an avatar, an artificial 3D figure that becomes its representative on the Net. As in a comic book, speech bubbles appear by each avatar when the children communicate with each other. The program consciously borrows elements familiar to the kids from computer games. This leads to easy and intuitive handling and a high uptake rate, report the researchers. To prevent undesirable trends and uptake problems, schools provide an ongoing critique of the program's educational value, technical quality and user-friendliness.