Virtual worlds are among the fastest growing online communities, and younger players in particular have adopted virtual worlds such as Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, Minecraft, Neopets, and Whyville as their new playgrounds, reaching hundreds of millions of participants, far more than their adult counterparts (Grimes & Fields, 2012). Research suggests that informal virtual worlds can provide rich learning opportunities for science inquiry and science conversations, for instance, when players not only experience, but also study epidemic outbreaks in real time (Kafai & Fefferman, 2010). While such epidemic simulations engage large numbers of participants, players also benefit from having access to tools such as simulators that support and direct further science inquiry. The challenge, then, is to figure out how to combine and leverage the best of both worlds: the structured and guided activities found in many school virtual worlds with the voluntary and social participation found in informal virtual worlds.
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