"Whyville is pretty much the most boring site in the world if you do not take this test," says one online review. One supposes, from a child safety standpoint, this is a good thing.
"It's just one layer of our sort of defense mechanism that [keeps] kids from coming in that want to be a loud mouth and cause trouble," says Goss. "We [also] have artificial intelligence that prevents the kids from talking about things we don't want them talking about. We have live monitoring, so you wander around Whyville and see kids with a piece of duct tape over their mouth, and that's because we've found them guilty of some crime in Whyville, and one of the punishments in Whyville is to lose your chat privileges ... for 'X' number of days. There's nothing more frustrating than logging in to Whyville and not being able to talk to your friends."
***
"I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way." - Whitney Houston
"On a bad day, we get a thousand new kids, and on a good day, we get three or four thousand brand new kids," says Goss. "We've basically gotten to the 2 million kids we have now by word of mouth. ... Every day, tens of thousands of visits are paid to Whyville. Every month, tens of thousands of new kids register for Whyville. Every way we tried to score this thing, it works."
Yet in spite of all it has going for it, Whyville still faces an uphill acceptance battle, mainly because it's not the most attractive site of its kind out there, and some kids are put off by its circa 1998 graphical interface. Goss considers this a strength, not a weakness.
"The more sophisticated the home computing environment gets," he says, "the equally true statement is the more heterogeneous that home computing environment gets. ... I have kids that can operate Whyville on a machine that's eight years old running on a 56k modem with nothing special going on, and they're having almost the exact same experience as you and I would if we went and bought a state of the art machine from Circuit City right now. So from an access standpoint it's been a huge competitive advantage.
"But I'll be the first to admit that 10 years from now, once the most the outdated machine in America is 10 years newer than it is today, we might change our tune a little bit, but we think it's definitely been the right strategy for the last eight years, and it's probably the right strategy for the next five."
Graphics aside, what Whyville brings to the kiddie table is an environment in which kids can explore all that science has to offer, and have fun while doing it. And NASA isn't the only institution that's taken notice.
"We just got a giant contract from a state organization ... that wants to promote a particular career path," says Goss. "This is an organization that wants kids to get excited about biotechnology so that in high school they're thinking about biotechnology, so when they get in college they pursue careers and they pursue majors in biotechnology, so they go on to become employees of that state's biotechnology firms.
"So we're going to unleash viruses on Whyville, and these kids are going to have to respond by going into their biology lab and creating anti-viruses."
Necessity, it would seem, is still the mother of invention. Even for children.
Russ Pitts is an Associate Editor for The Escapist. His blog can be found at www.falsegravity.com.
