When President Obama addressed the Muslim world in 2009 and talked of having students collaborate online between Kansas and Cairo, Amr Abdalla Attia and David Denton knew it was a good idea: They'd been doing much the same already.

Now their students have done it, too.

The two men are architects, Attia in Cairo and Denton in Los Angeles, and they've built a new model of collaboration and teaching between continents and cultures. Attia and six of his students at Ain Shams University spent a week in the United States in August to show off their work -- designs for a public space and hotel near the Pyramids of Giza -- and discuss the success of their collaboration with students at the University of Southern California.

Attia said he and Denton became acquainted about four years ago when Attia needed an international partner on a project in Egypt. The project didn't work out, but they met and became friends when Attia visited the United States on a fellowship in 2007, and Denton introduced him to the online world of Second Life, an animated, three-dimensional virtual reality. Then, when Denton was hired to design a large shopping complex in Cairo, he brought in Attia as a local partner.

"We decided to work it out on Second Life, because this is how we could save on travel and we could interact on a daily basis," Attia said. "We finished this project, and it was transformed from the virtual world to blueprints in just no time."

Designing the project online gave the architects the opportunity to see how it would look in three dimensions from every angle. "When we presented it to the client, although we had drawings with us, we didn't show him any drawings," Denton said. "We just took him on a walking tour of the building [online], and he responded very positively to that."

The 170,000-square-meter shopping complex is under construction in the Cairo area.

Then came Obama's address in Cairo, with its call for collaboration, and Denton responded with a message to Washington: "He said, 'We've done what you are talking about. We've done already what you guys are proposing to do," Attia said. As a result, the State Department invited Denton and Attia to speak at a conference on architecture and collaboration in the virtual world.

Architects Amr Abdalla Attia, left, and David Denton worked together online from Egypt and the United States and decided to try teaching a class the same way.

"We decided, why stop there? It's not only a commercial thing," Attia said. "Yes, Second Life is great, and the virtual world is great in helping us design the spaces and create architectural designs, but it's an excellent educational tool. Why not take this experience and teach it to students? The idea is it crossed borders, so we might as well not stop at teaching American students or Egyptian students but a mixture of both, or maybe others."

Attia chose a very real and prominent site for a student design project: about 70 acres between the Grand Egyptian Museum, now under construction, and the Pyramids of Giza. The more than 50 third-year students in Cairo were divided into eight teams, each with a member in Los Angeles, to come up with designs for the site.

"Because we are between the museum and the pyramids, we can't block the view. So we were designing, like, the foreground of the photo from the Egyptian Museum to the pyramids," said Nourhan El-Zafarany, one of Attia's students. "We had to work with the same restrictions, but everyone has his own way of creating something new and of putting things functionally together."

The design teams met online through their online personalities, called avatars, to discuss ideas -- late in the afternoon for the Egyptians and in the morning for the Americans. They learned from their professors' criticism of all the projects. And in some cases, they became friends.

"We clicked at the first day," El-Zafarany said of her new best friend, a Taiwanese-American student. "It was wonderful. And I couldn't see her in California; she was in Shanghai the time we were there, and we were, like, crying on Skype for an hour before I came. ... I have her on Facebook, on Skype, on Second Life, on everything."

Rageh Mohamed Al-Azzazi said the California students gave each team a different perspective. "We told them things they don't know, and they told us things we don't know," he said.

"I was thinking about Second Life as a design tool for my project, to hand it out in my university," Al-Azzazi said. His California design partner, though, suggested "making virtual designs and luxury in the skies and making a café above the pyramids to see the pyramids from a view from above, and I was like, 'This is not possible in real life, but it's possible in Second Life.' ... There was a conceptual interchange between our different backgrounds."

El-Zafarany said each side complemented the other. "Egyptians, we have the layers part. We have a lot of layers from history and the heritage and the culture and everything," she said. "We have the part of the ancient Egyptians, and then we have the Islamic and the Coptic and the modern layers."

"In California, they have the modern part. They have the technological part and the structures, the skyscrapers, the new sprawl, the ideas of having new commercial ways of thinking and things like that. So they have the very, very modern technological part and we have the very, very rich cultural part. So when mixing them together, that was the turning point."

"Next term we will do a project in Los Angeles," Attia said. "We have selected a site, and so both students, both universities, will design a building in Los Angeles downtown," on what's now a parking lot bordering downtown and a poorer Hispanic community. The Egyptian students visited and photographed the site and interviewed people who live and work near it so they can judge what uses would be appropriate.

The online, intercontinental collaboration will continue to be an essential feature of the course. "The whole interaction and cultural exchange and everything was unbelievable," El-Zafarany said. "It added more layers to our brains as architects and even as humans."