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posttransplant patients, they were using Zora from their homes. The availability and
technical knowledge of the parents varied and there was need for one-on-one face-
to-face support as some of the children where young and did not know how to install
software, troubleshoot, etc. In terms of data collection, both of these projects pre-
sented challenges in terms of missing data and lack of access to the participants for
pre- and postsurveys. The ClubZora project presented a different challenge, but also
yielded a lot of learning, as it was the first of the studies to be conducted on a very
much larger scale than the other three.
As another example, in terms of institutional context of usage, while the summer
camp and the ACT program where run at the researcher's universities, the other two
studies involved a strong collaborative component with the home institutions, such
as Children's Hospital Boston and The Intel Computer Clubhouse Network. This
posed new challenges as both interdisciplinary perspectives and cultural organiza-
tional expectations and mandates needed to be negotiated on a frequent basis. In
some cases, negotiations slowed down the program and hinder children's sustained
engagement.
It is our hope that this chapter will provide insights from our experience that will
help designers, implementers, and evaluators of programs that use virtual worlds
specifically aimed for young people, to take into consideration that thinking needs to
be done, not only about the design and implementation of the virtual world, but also
in terms of how the curriculum and the mentoring model will play out, what the scale
of the project and the diversity of the population will be, how the project evaluation
will be conducted and how this will influenced by the type of contact with parti-
cipants, and finally, how the participant's access environment and the institutional
context of usage will have a profound impact in the type of intervention program
that can be designed, implemented, and evaluated.
Acknowledgments
We thank our collaborators at Children Hospital Boston and The Intel
Computer Clubhouse Network, as well as at Academic Technologies, Tufts University. Finally, we
thank the National Science Foundation for support of this research through an NSF Career grant
#IIS-0447166 and the Tisch College of Public Service and Citizenship for a Faculty Fellowship.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of
the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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