Zora

Zora is a multi-user graphical environment specifically developed to help users design and inhabit a virtual city. Several users can interact and communicate with each other in real time through a chat system. Users can populate the virtual world with their own interactive creations. They can design objects, characters, personal spaces, and a virtual community. Users can select avatars to represent themselves and develop their corresponding profiles that specify personal heroes and villains, cherished values, and biographies. This three-dimensional multi-user environment engages learners in the design of a graphical virtual city and its social organization. Through the Zora projects, children and teenagers created virtual autotopographies, spatial representations of identity composed of collections of objects and characters representing aspects of themselves. 

The first version of Zora was developed while Professor Marina Umaschi Bers was completing her doctoral work at the MIT Media Lab, using the Microsoft Virtual Worlds development platform. The second version of Zora was developed at Tufts University by Professor Marina Umaschi Bers, her team of students in the DevTech research group and Academic Technologies using the ActiveWorlds platform.

The design of Zora was inspired by the Jewish Sabbath, as a  “palace in time”, reserved for introspection, self-reflection and community building. The Jewish philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that the Sabbath is a “palace in time” in our modern lives: (Heschel, 1951). According to Heschel, the seventh day belongs to the realm of time, as opposed to the realm of space: a time for introspection and reflection. A time for stopping the everyday work and looking back at who we are, how we are feeling and how we are building a caring, just and responsible community. Heschel’s description inspires Zora’s design. 

The Sabbath served Dr. Bers as a powerful “object to think with” and informed the kind of experience that she hoped young people would have while engaging with the virtual world. She wanted kids to enter a very special place, “a palace in time”, that would afford them similar experiences to the ones she had when entering the Synagogue: engage in self-reflection, creation, creativity, communication and participation in a community. She hoped children would collaborate with others in on-going community projects and, at the same time, engage in personally meaningful projects. She imagined them entering into “a palace in time” where they would find tools for self-reflection and community building that would go beyond the traditional prayers, words and conversations that she found at the synagogue. She wanted results of quiet introspection and self-reflection to become tangible and manipulable.