According to the San Antonio Express News, the Texas Workforce is helping to teach children to handle credit and the importance of developing vaccines:
n Texas, Whyville recently received grants totaling $440,000 from the Texas Workforce Commission to build Whyville Biotech and Whyville Advanced Manufacturing Center.
The site's designers created Whyville Biotech to teach kids how to develop vaccines against WhyPox, a flu-like epidemic that erupts each year. WhyPox causes kids' avatars — their virtual characters — to break out with red spots on their faces. Last fall, during real-world flu season, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention virtually vaccinated 134,000 kids in Whyville.
Through the Texas grant, kids also will learn about drug design and discovery, as well as new techniques in computational biology, Bower said.
Eventually, Whyville citizens will build biotechnology companies in Whyville, Bower said.
"From a work-force standpoint, this is huge," he said. "We have a 'cool' factor, but we're also doing something very useful for these industries."
1 comment:
Another gimmik in education - I dont think the users are going to enjoy it, or learn anything.
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