Where Learning Happens - Roblox Blog

Where Learning Happens – Roblox Blog

Time Stamp: August 21, 2023 11:58 AM
Source Node: 2839103

At Roblox, we’ve long been building a place for people to connect with optimism and civility, and where there’s something for everyone. I’m proud of our growing library of learning experiences on Roblox that epitomize this ambition, offering students engaging ways to discover scientific phenomena, new skills, historical places and times, and dynamic interactions that may otherwise be out of reach.

We’re committed to offering high-quality educational opportunities, and in doing so, we’re staying true to the vision our CEO and co-founder, Dave Baszucki, established early on of enhancing education through immersive and collaborative learning. We’re doing that by continuing to make investments in our educational ecosystem, including working with an outstanding community of developers and educational providers who are demonstrating the promise of learning in deep, rich, and collaborative experiences. 

Over the last two years, through the Roblox Community Fund (RCF), we’ve been providing grants to outstanding pairs of developers and educational organizations who already work with thousands of educators and millions of students across formal and informal educational settings. The first set of grantees are showcasing the power of the Roblox platform, community, and developers’ creative game mechanics and systems. 

Rich educational experiences from expert partners

When I joined Roblox in 2020, I laid out our plan to support 100 million students learning on our platform by 2030. We envisioned a robust educational ecosystem that preserved the excitement, friendship, and exploration our 66 million daily active users feel when engaging with Roblox experiences like games, simulations, musical events, and open immersive worlds.

When we launched RCF, our goal was to kickstart this educational ecosystem by investing in a library of high-quality educational experiences spanning subject areas and grade levels. Two years in, the initial cohort has internalized Roblox’s core “Respect the Community” value by building content that meets our users’ expectations of finding novel, social, and fun spaces on Roblox. 

We remain focused on investing in projects that balance usability with the practical constraints educators face when incorporating Roblox experiential learning into class time. These first RCF-backed experiences do more than just transposing existing lessons. Instead, they’re built using learning content that feels native to Roblox and its community. Educators and students can jump right into collaborative problem solving, systems thinking, creativity, and domain-specific knowledge and skills. For example, imagine being able to figure out how to design and build a Mars rover.   

Engaging, rigorous content

The RCF investments we’ve made build upon years and years of educational content built by our passionate community. Today, we want to share the first set of RCF experiences: 

  • Mission: Mars from Museum of Science and Filament Games tasks students with designing and building a rover to explore and survive on Mars. Based on real NASA data, it makes developing science and engineering skills exciting.
  • In Pathogen Patrol from Project Lead The Way (PLTW), students collaborate on defending a sick patient from invading pathogens. Playing the roles of white blood cells, they’ll learn how to protect the person’s health. 
  • With Lua Learning from boatbomber, students navigate curated community tutorials, interactively learn to code, and complete classroom assignments in Lua.
  • Popfizz Computer Science launched a curriculum that teaches students to develop projects in Lua or Roblox Studio that meet all AP Computer Science Principles Performance Task requirements.

In the months to come, program grantees will launch additional experiences and curriculum aligned to meet classroom standards:

  • RoboCo Sports League from FIRST Robotics and Filament Games leverages Roblox’s realistic physics engine to create an open-ended space where students can design, build, and control any robot they can imagine. RoboCo Sports League will complement and expand access to FIRST’s engaging in-person robotics programs and competitions. 
  • CodeCombat Worlds from CodeCombat empowers every player to become a creator. Students learn to code in Lua by completing quests, practicing their coding skills through adventuring with friends and coding pets, and ultimately, building their own experiences with a suite of acceleration tools designed to enable anyone to code and create.
  • Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and NWEA are building an experience designed to assess student knowledge of Newtonian physics by exploring how principles like acceleration and force can impact vehicle behaviors as they are launched towards a target zone.
  • CodeHS is designing a full AP Computer Science curriculum along with professional development for teachers that utilizes Roblox Studio to teach the field’s fundamental principles while preparing students for the rigorous demands of the AP Computer Science Principles test.  
  • GoldieBlox has partnered with Wonderworks on an escape-room style experience focused on teaching Next Generation Science Standards aligned chemistry. Users will learn the science while escaping from a mad scientist’s secret laboratory. 
  • Mrs. Wordsmith, which provides English Language Arts instruction to more than 300,000 students worldwide, is building Words of Power, in which users play the role of wizards using words to defeat fantastical beasts, all while building their vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. 

In addition, numerous developers and institutions, including several world-renowned museums, have also created educational experiences on Roblox. These include:

  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Replica, built in conjunction with Verizon, lets visitors at the New York museum scan artifacts and bring them into Roblox experiences via augmented reality. 
  • TechQuest, from the Computer History Museum, goes beyond the exhibits by showing how technology and data can be used to improve our understanding of endangered ecosystems while solving the challenges our communities face. 
  • CurioCity, from The Franklin Institute, takes students on a journey to explore space and the human body.
  • MIZU Aquamarine brings you deep into the ocean for a conservational journey around the world while you explore and restore underwater ecosystems.

Roblox is where learning happens

I’m excited about the many rigorous learning experiences coming from our RCF partners and our developer community at large, but our work to make Roblox the educational platform of the future goes well beyond content. 

Over time, we want Roblox to be broadly available to students, including informal learning settings. As an example, more than 150,000 high school students have access to PLTW’s Pathogen Patrol as part of the organization’s nationwide Biomedical Science program. And the global Roblox community can freely access the experience as of today. We believe students across the world would enjoy learning together on Roblox, and we’re hard at work making it easier for educators to use Roblox at school. 

As we pursue our goals for Roblox Education, we’re deeply appreciative of the developers who have made experiences that foster learning for people of all ages on our platform. We look forward to what’s coming in the years ahead, and we can’t wait to share that progress with you.

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