PASADENA - It's a typical Friday afternoon in Whyville. The beaches are packed with preteens anxiously planning their weekends and snickering about the opposite sex.
Gaggles of middle schoolers are filling up the local mall, where they part with hard-earned cash to purchase sparkly earrings and tank tops.
For those who feel like getting away from the hustle and bustle, there is always the option of teleporting into outer space, or taking a motorboat to the wetlands and conducting algae research with professional oceanographers.
The ordinary and extraordinary coexist almost without distinction inside the Pasadena-based Whyville.net, a virtual community for youths - usually ages 10-13 - founded by a former Caltech professor and graduates.
Once the domain of only hard-core gamers and early adopters, the concept of "living" and interacting online is fast reaching the mainstream.
Millions of users are now registered with a variety of virtual communities worldwide. Online, residents form their own digital characters, called avatars, and go about integrating into their chosen online societies.
"There are so many places out there," said Jacquelyn Ford Morie, senior scientist and associate director for Creative Development at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies. "All have their different customs, constraints and social morays based on what we have in everyday life."
But while there's been an explosion in the number
First online in 1999, the seeds for the project were planted in 1986 by Caltech biology professor Jim Bower.
Bower, an innovator in the field of education technology, had created a primitive community inside the Los Angeles County Library's computer system that allowed children to explore its offerings. By the late 1990s, he had advanced his work with an array of educational projects, and turned his attention toward a way to teach science to children via an informal, social and interactive setting.
"We knew that if you wanted to engage kids you have to have a social component. We're all fundamentally social, we are a social animal," he said, adding that, in this setting, learning can be designed to appeal to young people's desire to stand out.
But while Bower saw the virtual community model as the logical direction the Internet would take, he had a hard time convincing anyone that it was a worthwhile idea.
"We were trying to convince people for a number of years that this makes sense and nobody in corporate America knew what we were talking about. So we did it ourselves," he said.
Bower, two Caltech graduates and a graphic designer from the Art Center College of Design resigned to going at it alone and, using much of Bower's own money, created Whyville and its parent company, Numedeon.
"We really just bootstrapped ourselves. It was really exciting," said Jennifer Sun, founding member and president of Numedeon. "We were convinced that the Internet was going to be for two-way interaction. We thought that was the most interesting thing that the Internet could offer this to education."
Today, Whvyille reports
2.2 million registered users from around the world and a list of sponsor companies that keeps growing.
The concept behind Whyville is simple. It's a world where kids do much of what adults do - with the idea that they are learning practical skills in the grown-up world at play. While a large amount of time is taken up chatting with friends, they also save money for land and build houses on their plots.
Here, it's common for 10-year-olds take out bank loans to purchase Toyota Scions (they all have WHYCO scores instead of FICO scores) and everyone works to support the economy, which is based on clam shells.
In order earn a "salary," and make use of most of what's available, users must participate in a variety of educational games and activities often sponsored by science organizations (Toyota is currently the only for-profit sponsor on the site).
One of the latest offerings is found at the most popular Whyville hangout, the beach.
Users arrive to find the ocean has turned red, and are instructed to take a water sample and head to the Whyville branch of the very real Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the largest independent oceanographic research institution in the United States.
There they examine the sample and identify the culprit as red bloom algae. Then they must investigate what's causing the algae outbreak and head out to the wetlands to figure out how to quell it.
It's a complex process.
"I don't know of any other sites of this kind that tries to attempt this type of science learning," said Yasmin Kafai,associate professor of psychological studies in education at UCLA who has studied Whyville extensively and written a range or research papers on the topic. "I think they are very successful in this respect - constantly innovating."
While Whyville was practically flying solo for a while, the times are certainly catching up with them.
In 2003, an adult-themed community called Second Life came online and began growing fast.
In late 2006, Second Life began attracting tons of media coverage, which sent attention back to Whyville in the process.
With all the buzz surrounding them, Numedeon's president, Sun, said she can't help but feel gratified, "to have been so ahead of the curve."
And even with all the new entrants to the game, Bower remains convinced his creation is still in a league of its own.
"The land has gotten richer and richer," he said, "but Whyville is a lot more deep and a lot more interesting than a lot of virtual worlds out there."
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