Whyville's users (Whyvillians) engage in virtual world simulation based games and role play sponsored by a wide range of governmental, non-profit, and corporate entities.

In another example, National Science Foundation awarded funding to ETR Associates to implement a project through middle school classrooms to engage young Hispanic women in computer game design and entrepreneurship.

In April, 2008, as part of its work with the Texas Workforce Commission, Whyville launched a new initiative for teachers called the WhyTexas Challenge.

[10] The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation funded research into how preteens explore and share information about reproductive health using Whyville.

[11] Educational Research on Whyville has now been published in the book "Connected Play: Tweens in a Virtual World" Authored by Yasmin B. Kafai, Deborah A.

Examples include NASA the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the J. Paul Getty Trust, Disney, EMI, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Scholastic Publishing the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Next Generation Learning Challenges, the US Department of Labor, the Texas Workforce Commission, and Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History.

[14] In this project, Whyville's citizens elect to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day, and a nutrition calculator then determines their state of health.

[15] Whyville has also recently worked with the Concord Consortium to implement a series of games based on breeding dragons as a way to learn genetics.