3D Worlds for education: Cooperation and Virtual Presence

New technologies offer extraordinary possibilities for innovative teaching/learning activities, provided we carefully investigate how to effectively integrate them into traditional classroom workflows. This paper deals with the case of cooperative 3D environments, that is, virtual “places” in which users connect in real time and access 3D worlds, being represented by Avatars (graphic representation of the users themselves). The paper is based on the authors’ experience with three educational projects all making use of 3D environments. All the three projects are aimed at schools (junior and high schools): they have involved so far more than 3,000 students, from Europe and Israel. Requirements, design issues, and educational effectiveness – focusing upon cooperation features, virtual presence and its evaluation– will be discussed, with the supporting evidence of data collected along the experimentation.