This was a very neat example of how a smart space could be developed for an educational experience.
- Students would be guided into small groups, each in a corner of the room, each with a particular climate.
- The projectors would initially begin by projecting a climate symbol on the wall. Could be various marine climates: high salinity, kelp forest, sandy bottom, tidal marsh, ...? Or different kinds of forests.
- Students would grab a PDA from the box, launch the PDA hug, and log into it. It would go to the database, find that student, and display the climate icon to which the student had been assigned by the teacher/author.
- Students would all go to the place in the room where the projector was matching up with their PDA display.
- They would each pick a laptop attached to that group server, and launch the SAIL activity, "Build an ecosystem." This would ask for their userID, and would download the appropriate groupware for their assigned eco climate.
- Software would guide students to develop flora and fauna for their ecosystem, leveraging the relevant life science. They would need to provide (simplified) food chain, which would be managed by the groupware.
- Ecosystem could be placed into "run" or "simulate" mode, to see if it progressed, stabilized, etc. This could be projected on the group's screen, so that all students can watch the result of the simulation. Individual students couls be responsible in the group for flora, fauna, etc.
- Individual creatures could be highlighted, to examine their interactions.
- A library of flora and fauna could be created by students (including animated gifs to capture their motion, as well as a table of "bio data"). These could be posted and exchangted with other students from the class or between classes.
- individual animals or plants could be transported using the PDA as a visual "fishbowl" form one ecosystem into another - the student literally "carrying" their organism in the PDA, from their group to another, and "invading" by beaming their organism into the new ecosystem.
- ecosystems could be subject to climate change, or human intervention (e.g., bottom trawling).
- Other creative games (including cooperative ones) could be invented - e.g., exploring different ways of responding to invasive species.
- different groups could download the same starting conditions, and then receive different variations of climate, or perform different interventions
- a "time warp" feature could be implemented, where the ecosystem jumps by a factor of 10 or 100 in the time step, allowing students to explore migration or evolution of species.