Minecraft is awesome, popular, reasonably priced and great for education. Roblox, a game in the Minecraft genre may also be, or become, all those things. Frankly, I am a little embarrassed that I had not heard of this before. Thankfully a grade four student told me about it. Roblox is aimed at the 12 and under market, but can be used by older students as well. It has a safe chat feature for students under 13 and parents are able to have a shared login to keep an eye on things. Roblox lets you build a virtual world (again think Minecraft) and then share out that world to others via the marketplace. The marketplace lets you play a ton of games for free and some are freemium games. Students spend Robux to buy things. Purchasing Robux costs money though. The build studio is not super great looking, but does get the job done. Students can build castles, robots, cars, aircraft carriers, whatever. It has less limits than Minecraft for design. The game play is easy and logical. For example, I dropped a car into the world and was able to climb on it drive around, and push things. No coding required. The emphasis is on design. Games are easily published to the site for others to share. Or… for teachers to assess? A link is given at the end of the upload for easy, peasy sharing.
Simple Uses?
- Build a section of a story a student has written. Maybe the “big race” scene from their novel.
- Create a landscape that represents a story or an historical point in time. Maybe a castle for example.
- Create a character and a world around that character. Develop a series of stories (video, written, or audio) and share them.
Do I Plan To Use It?
I really want to use this next year as part of our design center we are developing. So many great tools to use.
Commitment And Learning Curve
Medium learning curve. You will get better as you go and students will be quick to figure out how to develop things. Their motivation is very high.
Best For
ES/MS
Cost
Paid and free options
Website
http://www.roblox.com
