On May 31, the authors of the popular children’s social game Roblox announced the creation of the educational project Roblox Education. In terms of scale, this initiative is comparable to the educational program of the company’s main competitor – Minecraft.
The project announced by Roblox includes three main areas. Firstly, these are free curricula for teachers on using the gaming platform in the classroom. The corpus of plans and subject areas will be constantly expanding: from physics lessons to design courses. In addition, the materials will be distributed under a Creative Commons license, and teachers will be able to modify them themselves and share their projects with colleagues.
Secondly, this summer Roblox is going to launch as many as 500 summer camps and online programs for young game developers around the world: in the USA, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, Spain, Brazil and Portugal. 45 promising developers will get to the training at the main office of the company: Previously, the children at this training developed some of the most popular games on the Roblox platform.
Participants of the Roblox pilot summer camp for young developers
Thirdly, as part of the educational project, the company launches the annual massive children’s game jam Creator Challenge.
Like Minecraft, Roblox is a social platform for creating custom games with blocky lego-style graphics. The platform, which has been in existence for more than ten years, is primarily focused on players under the age of 13, its MAU currently has 64 million active users per month (for comparison, Minecraft’s MAU is 74 million).
Roblox attracts young children with ready-made games, in adolescence they begin to create projects on the Roblox Studio engine themselves, and by high school their skills are enough to create successful projects that, among other things, bring money from the sale of game items: over the past year, the creators of games on the platform have earned a total of $ 30 million.
It should be noted that the educational market attracts more and more large gaming companies. In addition to the above MinecraftEdu, this week the Swedes from Paradox Interactive presented an educational version of their strategy Cities: Skylines.