Matthew,

You should probably explore the Croquet environment. They can import
motion capture files for avatar control which might be relevant for
your project.
http://www.croquetproject.org
Join their discussion lists and also check out what other universities
are doing with it in the US, Japan, Europe, South America, etc. Many
white papers can be found presented at the C5 conference.
http://www.db.soc.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/c5-06/

You'll find the Squeakland discussion list has more discussions on
academic and child education and how Squeak can help.
http://Squeakland.org

Cheers,
Darius