Encyclopedia of Life Blog

The BioSynC’s latest initiative in digital learning, a virtual coral reef, is live online! The reef learning environment, called WhyReef, just launched in Whyville.net.  You can access the reef directly (after an intro screen) at reef.whyville.net . Its free to join or you can sign in as a guest.

WhyReef’s goals are to teach about the diversity of life on reefs, the interconnectedness of species, collaborative counting of reef species, and how to mobilize to “fix” the reef if/when something goes wrong. We will report back in a few weeks on progress and lessons learned.

We set a pretty insane timeline for ourselves and had only 90 days from grant to launch! Our team included staff at BioSynC (Beth Sanzenbacher, Mark Westneat, and Audrey Aronowsky), Field Museum (Johanna Thompson, Elizabeth Babcock, and Krystal Villanosa) and Numedeon, the parent company of Whyville (including Jen Sun, Jim Bower, Mark Dinan, CJ Circo, and Alfred Lo). It has been an exhausting stretch, but Beth, Jo, and Mark D have been amazing!

The virtual reef project is funded by MacFound DML and is our first major foray into virtual worlds and education. We have collaborated on some smaller scale, pilot projects with Global Kids; including the fantastic “I Dig Tanzania!” pilot in Teen Second Life.