Creating cyberworlds: experiences in computer science education

This article shows that the creation of cyberworlds (interactive virtual environments) can be an excellent educational tool covering a wide range of computer science and engineering disciplines. We present the experiences gathered during more than one semester of work with computer science students in the framework of semester projects developed at the virtual reality lab of EPFL. Our objective is to share the lessons learnt by both the students and researchers (project advisors). We describe the projects proposed, the methods applied to help the students reach the objectives, the problems faced during the development work and how we managed to solve them.