"Once you get a kid sort of self declaring that they're not good at or not interested in math or science," says Goss, "the likelihood that they ever circle back later on in their educational careers is next to nothing. Whereas if you and I decide we don't like American History as 12th graders, we might very well get into American History come college or in a graduate program. But once you kind of turn yourself off of math and science, you never go back.
"When you put a man on the moon, that kind of carries the day for a couple decades, but nowadays putting a man on the moon's just not going to do it. ... One of the things that will do it is if we start teaching science in a more hands on manner and inquiry based fashion.
"That's exactly why NASA is in Whyville. NASA is the sponsor of the Whyville Aeronautics and Space Administration, and in that particular place in Whyville, you get to learn about rocket science and spectroscopy and ion engine technology, and they're literally playing what you and I would call almost videogame vignettes. [Kids are] sitting down to play Tetris, only in order to succeed in Tetris you have to learn something about spectroscopy."
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"The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
As Mary Poppins would testify, kids will do almost anything if you can convince them it's a game. And the capacity to make an interesting and fun game for kids is almost unlimited in the virtual world. This can be good and bad. I wondered how selective Whyville was in choosing advertising and educational partners, and how the community dealt with troublemakers and "bad seeds."
"We had to draw a line in the sand and decide who we would not let in," Goss says. "Let's take Coca Cola. So the cat's out of the bag, it turns out that Coke's really not a good product for you to drink. ... But if you want to bring Coke into Whyville, there are still a lot of things we could do. We could open up a Coca Cola bottling plant, and [then] we could teach kids about something that Coca Cola could take credit for, that might be more acceptable to us than just having a Coca Cola vending machines sprinkled through Whyville. It's not so much who and what we would let into Whyville but how we let them into Whyville."
This philosophy extends to Whyville's residents. The site is, after all, a virtual community, and anyone who's watched network TV news can attest that online predators are after our kids. Many parents reject the site out of hand, fearing its connection to the internet (and therefore internet users) makes it impossible to restrict who and what their children will encounter there. According to Goss and others, there's no need to worry.
Last year Whyville's safety features won it a "Best Product" award from iParenting and Linda Knapp, writing for McClatchy-Tribune News Service, called Whyville "safer than most" online communities for kids. Chief among Whyville's safety measures is its encouragement that parents take an active role in their children's online lives, knowing where they go and why. To encourage this, Whyville makes it difficult for children to sign up for accounts without a parent's knowledge and employs the usual array of technological and human measures. Among them: a simple test.
"So for example, a kid ... can register today and play all the games today, but if they want to chat with their friends they have to [take] a chat test," says Goss.
The pre-chat test, designed to be taken by children with adult supervision, poses various situational scenarios and suggests how children are expected to respond; who to talk to, for example, and what subjects are not appropriate.
