Roblox is working to be a place where kids come to learn, not just play.
The popular metaverse gaming company is investing $15 million into its Roblox Community Fund, which supports educational programming on the platform, as it looks to support creators of experiences teaching everything from math to mental and emotional health strategies.
“We imagine a world where millions of students will be learning via co-experiences on Roblox that facilitate solving problems, creating, collaborating, and having fun together,” said Roblox CEO and founder David Baszucki in an email to Fast Company. “We already see how 3D simulated virtual environments where people are together can open up learning opportunities that aren’t possible in the physical world and help understand concepts in richer, more engaging ways.”
The new investment comes on top of a previous $10 million contribution to the fund, and Roblox is already welcoming new high-profile learning games to the platform. Those include a Community Fund-supported robotics game called RoboCo Sports League, built by educational game maker Filament Games in collaboration with FIRST, the robotics education and competition organization founded by inventor Dean Kamen. The game lets players work side-by-side in a digital environment to build virtual robots with parts like pistons, springs, and motors, then take the simulated bots into competitions ranging from soccer to sheepherding.
Its creators envision it will enable more students to take part in robotics activities, since it reduces the logistical and financial challenges inherent in building physical robots. Filament Games CEO Dan White says he imagines some schools will also use it is a rapid prototyping platform to test out ideas for real-world robots and as a way to supplement a limited number of physical robotics kits.
“We definitely designed it with the idea that it can be an augment or a standalone,” he says. “In a perfect world, everybody gets access to some sort of physical experience as well.”
Though Filament builds educational games for a variety of platforms, Roblox is particularly well-suited for RoboCo Sports League, since it has such strong support for multiplayer experiences, a key component of the FIRST methodology, White says. “It would be like saying you’d make soup without stock if you didn’t have real-time multiplayer,” he says.
Educational game makers also value Roblox’s moderation system, says Rebecca Kantar, VP and head of education at Roblox. “We have a sophisticated team of real-person monitors and safety folks on the platform,” she says.
In general, the kid-friendly metaverse platform has recently emphasized its moderation and community standards, even as it’s opened the door for age-restricted games catering to its growing number of adult players and a wider range of community-generated content.
Its popularity with young people means many students are already familiar with the Roblox interface, meaning it’s easy for them to jump into new games on the platform. “It becomes another mechanism where we can reach students where they’re at,” says Taylor Puett, a product marketing manager at Project Lead the Way, which offers STEM curricular materials and teacher training.
PLTW, as the organization is known, recently launched a Community Fund-supported Roblox game called Pathogen Patrol, where students take on the roles of different types of white blood cells inside the body, working together to fight infection. Dr. Julye Adams, a PLTW biomedical science master teacher based in Kentucky, says she plans to use the game to help teach students about the immune system.
The flexibility of the Roblox platform means her students can play the game in class and at home on a variety of devices, including phones, Chromebooks, and computers projected on a classroom screen, where others can watch and cheer them on as they fight virtual disease, she says.
“I suspect that I’ll even play, and they can tell me how bad I am,” she says.
As the Community Fund gives out additional grants, Kantar says Roblox is generally interested in promoting additional games that meld gameplay and learning, perhaps in relatively untapped subjects like math, rather than experiences that alternate dry educational elements with playful rewards for those students who get through them.
After all, for an educational game to be effective, it needs to succeed as a game—not just a school assignment. “If we aren’t engaging players, then we’re not doing our job,” says Filament’s White.
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