Today was the official launch of Muppyville. At 1:55 I signed into the school and walked down to the computer lab. The fellow who runs the lab really does an astounding job, given the time and resources he has to work with. He's shared with another school and obviously spends a lot of time just keeping things together. He welcomed me warmly and I made a few last minute adjustments before the class came down. I had found that one student's name had been misspelled on my list, so I fixed that quickly.
When the class arrived, we passed out the handouts I had printed. On each one, I had affixed a pair of sticky notes: the front one, with the username, covering the back one with the password -- a trick I learned from George. I offered only the sketchiest of remarks and got them started. At first there was a lot of confusion, but within a couple of minutes the first one was logged in -- and discovered he was not alone! A character called "The Minstrel" was already there! The Minstrel is a classmate who has been out sick, but who started logged into Muppyville a couple of days ago (when I first built the accounts and sent out the account info). The teachers, the lab coordinator, and I all helped students log in, but the most helpful was probably Charlie who ran from station to station helping students and even got the Librarian to let us use the workstations that are normally used for the card catalog. Within 5 minutes there were a dozen logged in and by 10 minutes everyone was in (to the limit of the number of machines in the lab. A few had to share and trade off.) Then the lab coordinator shut off the light to get everyone's attention and gave a little speech about Netiquette, which Charlie supplemented with an advisory to be aware that what you said might be overheard even when you thought no-one else was there. Good advice. A few minutes later, a teacher encouraged the students to not just "chit chat" and to do what I had suggested on the handout. (I thought it was fine if they just "chitchatted", but it was fine to provide a little more direction too.) After only 35 minutes, we were finishing up and the kids walking back to the classroom.
We didn't dawdle on the way home, but by the time we logged in, there were already other kids in Muppyville! Over the course of the afternoon and early evening, half the class succeeded in logging in from home. It's too early to say if the enthusiasm will persist, but so far they seem really excited. Several are interested in learning how to create rooms and objects.