Credit Union Island Opening Event Press Release
From VitalWiki
VITAL (Virtual Immersive Technologies and Arts for Learning) Lab has collaborated with the Filene Research Institute and Members United Corporate Federal Credit Union to create an interactive 3-D financial education game in the Second Life 3-D online virtual world. Now, more than ever, financial education is a critical need for the youth generations. With a call for personal responsibility and financial prudence becoming a national initiative, the project team felt creating an exciting game in a social network format would be more appealing and more effective than traditional educational medium.
VITAL Lab worked in conjunction with these industry partners to create a viable educational format that incorporated technology, education and finance to provide the most comprehensive game solution. The project has received national press coverage in the Credit Union industry and the prototype of the game will be made available to the public on February 11th, 2009.
"This is an exciting time," says Scott Moriarty, the industry lead on this project, "we are finally ready to introduce the concept to the public, and working with Ohio University VITAL Lab to create a comprehensive educational option has really taken the game to the next level. We feel this will help provide an extremely valuable tool to educators and engage youth to learn more about this critical topic."
"This has been a great project for the Lab," says Dr. Chang Liu, Associate Professor of Computer Science and VITAL Lab Director, "We have been working on the forefront of immersive technologies in learning applications for a few years. This project gave us an opportunity to collaborate internally with experts from education and finance departments and externally with leaders in the credit union industry to apply our technologies and make a real-world impact in this important area."
Comments from Dr. Roger Shelor, Finance Professor:
My involvement with the Credit Union Island project adds an additional
dimension to my teaching about Finance and Real Estate. With the assistance of
MBA student Adam Scalzo and the VITAL lab graduate student programming staff,
we have developed a plan for introducing students to complicated personal
finance matters such as investing, budgeting, the use of credit cards, and
other matters such as purchasing and financing a car or home. Interestingly,
my upper level undergraduate students and MBA students who have previewed the
game and are excited about this method of learning financial concepts.
To learn more about this project, check out http://vital.cs.ohiou.edu/vitalwiki/index.php/Credit_Union.
