Woogi World

» see woogiworld.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

American elementary school in 2008 is about as far from my own history as a room can get, and Woogi World was built for exactly that room. It was a virtual world a teacher signed a whole class into, not something a kid found on their own, which makes it one of the rare children's worlds where the customer and the user were different people entirely.

The company behind it was Children's Way, a non-profit, and the money came from donors rather than from parents, so participating schools paid nothing. Kids got an avatar and a house, joined clubs for music or reading, and worked through curriculum modules. The list of subjects tells you what it was: Cyber Safety first, then Woogi English, music, mathematics, science and reading. The title tag on the homepage called it a K-6 virtual school, and that was not marketing stretch. It really was trying to be a school.

Cyber safety was the load-bearing idea. The pitch to a principal in 2008 was that children were going to end up on the internet regardless, so better they learn how to behave in a walled version where the consequences are scripted. Whether that works is a question the whole category never answered, but Woogi World is one of the few that put it in the curriculum instead of the marketing copy. It carried a kidSAFE seal on every page, which by the standards of the era was the closest thing to an inspection certificate.

~ the record ~

~ the school deal ~

Being free changes what a product has to do. Woogi World never needed a virtual currency or a shop full of hats, and it never had to build the pester-your-parents funnel that every commercial kids world of that decade depended on. What it needed instead was an endless supply of donors and school districts willing to schedule computer lab time, which turned out to be a harder thing to keep than a subscription.

It did have its moments of reach. In 2008 it ran a campaign called Every Kid Votes alongside the presidential election, and by its own count more than six million children cast a mock ballot. In November of the same year it launched a reading club with HarperCollins and Penguin, giving kids access to classic stories as they leveled up. Those are large numbers attached to a small operation, and they are the reason the name still turns up in education write-ups years after the site went.

~ the wigwatts ~

The clearest record of the ending is the official blog, which ran from 2007 and posted steadily through 2013. The last entry is dated 20 June 2013 and is written in character. Mr. Wigwatts had gone missing back in February under mysterious circumstances, the Woogi celebrities were setting off on an expedition to find him, that summer's Summer Splash event was postponed, and BigWig would be joining the search. Then nothing. The expedition never came back and neither did the blog.

The site outlived its own story by two and a half years. The Internet Archive has the world's homepage serving normally on 19 November 2015, and by 11 December the same address is a WordPress page for Woogi Global, an English language learning business. The domain and the brand root carried over. Nothing else did, and no announcement anywhere says the world had closed. Today woogiworld.com answers with a single line of text saying the page cannot be displayed, which is the only closing notice it ever got.

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