“Learning Villages” (LV) is an educational online game developed by the Centre for the Advancement of Information Technology in Education (CAITE) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

Similar to other commercialized online games in the market, LV also provides different interesting elements commonly found, which include role-play characters, virtual scenarios, online chatrooms and game missions, etc.

From the educational point of view, LV is a virtual world composed of a WebQuest task and different knowledge construction tools assigned for the players. The players are encouraged to discuss their project-based learning activities and share their learning processes in the learning villages. One theme is set for each village and the players are welcome to discuss with each other based on the themes they are interested in.

Players can join any learning villages by building a house there to initiate an issue for others to discuss. Other villagers are welcome to join the discussions in two different ways:

• build a new house near the others in the same village to express ideas relative to the others and then use a road to display the linkages of these ideas.
• Simply go into a house and then discuss there.

The whole system facilitates quality discussions by the following ways:

• LV virtual money (Donut)
• A reputation system
• Restricted roles you can perform

For details about our LV project, you may visit this link