Dinosaurs and Volcanoes: Roblox Education's Jurassic World Challenge

[Music] hello everyone allow me hi hi this is how you can tell I'm the teacher I keep expecting sort of callback response so I've been in the EdTech industry for over 10 years and I got into EdTech because of game development and because of working in 3d animation so this is really exciting for me so throughout the years I've been responsible for bringing a variety of different game engines to the classroom I'm usually the girl you call when there's no documentation so I don't get to do fun things like unreal or unity I like going where no one really has gone before and in those 10 years that I've been in the EdTech I've also had the great pleasure of leading education teams that are responsible for subject matters like cryptography machine vision everything down to scratch and practically every single programming language Under the Sun I probably had a produce of course

on it but I'm here today as part of robots education over this past year I've had the great pleasure of getting to officially launch roblox education we have a website now you should check it out and today's talk is on the roblox creator challenge so the roblox creative challenge is a self-paced tutorial that's designed to attract new people to game development and coding assuming they've had absolutely no experience with it before so the topics I'm gonna go over today first of all what is the creator challenge so you have some idea of what I'm talking about why do we do this why is it important to us why is this important to our industry what are some of the challenges and strategies for working with a group that is new to these subjects and then finally what did we learn from our first roblox crater

challenge and how are we using that as we move forward in our newer iterations Oh so the roadblocks create a challenge as I mentioned is a self-paced template based tutorial designed specifically for people of no experience with game designer coding each creator challenge has three parts we have a template that has some pre-built assets to it this works with in roblox studio which is the development tool that's used to create all of roblox's games we have the step-by-step tutorial section so you can actually figure out how to do the things and then finally we have a quiz game this is our checks for understanding it's also how we deliver prizes such as badges and free avatar items our first creator challenge was in partnership with Jurassic world it attracted over 6 million people and in 3 months we had

over 270,000 games published so I'm going to show you a video it was made actually during last summer so some of the numbers on it or older but you get to see the template that we use and you also get to see a lot of the student embellishments to it so in addition to dinosaurs and falling rocks you're probably gonna see maybe some falling eyeballs if you're paying close attention beachballs some really colorful climbing walls so you can tell there's some student work in here [Music] [Music]

[Music] [Music] so that's the real blacks creative challenge I'm very proud of it yeah thank you appreciate that so that's what the creative challenge is so now why do we do this roblox isn't an education company we do all of this for free so particularly teachers like to ask me what's in it for us and why we do it is really born of the question how can they UGC platform actively Drive diversity in our player base to me I think the answer is fairly

obvious by driving a more diverse developer community and that's how roadblocks fell so that's why they hired me we started creating content giving it away to teachers so we released lesson plans tutorials we work with some really fantastic education leaders in the industry but it wasn't quite enough we were finding that these programs that we were working with it was more affluent students who were attending and it also was people who already knew they wanted to make video games which is great we want them to make video games but we also want the people who had it ever occur to them to make a video game to come and try to make games we also want perhaps the people who didn't have the opportunity who couldn't afford to go to these like really awesome tech camps in the summer so we decided we were gonna make our own tutorial and release it completely free all right so how many educators do I have in the room ok a few how many guys are game

developers awesome Wow thank you very much for coming they love you guys see we're educators let's see I need you guys teach college-level nah middle school alright high school ok anyone teaching like elementary school elementary school ok so a lot of the things I'm talking today aren't really age specific strategies there are a lot of challenges with working with certain age groups but the subjects I'm going over today are much more about how do you tract people to come and be game developers in the first place assuming that they've got no experience how do you keep them all right so that's what I would say so the first challenge you have it's getting them to try out your content in the first place and getting them to not leave with the next challenge a good place to getting them to come in and try it is by leveraging

their interests and of course giving them rewards in our case we're leveraging the fact that we have a really popular platform if you work with a younger age group or if you know any kids that are 10 and up they tend to love us the other thing that we have in our favors were working with the Jurassic world fallen Kingdom it's really hard to go wrong with dinosaurs and lava and volcanoes however if you're not working with those sets of IPs there are options if you're working with younger students you can bring in evergreen themes anything like narwhals cats dogs like ninja is stuff that doesn't isn't necessarily IP related will make your content instantly more relatable and if you're working with older students you can still look at what they're interested in they have hobbies they love pop culture you can show how you can connect game development to any subject matter they love it doesn't matter if it's sports and you can also show them how game development can be a

vehicle for taking the social issues that are important to them and creating a narrative around it and speaking of narrative when you're working with these themes you don't just want to throw those interests into images and to reward items you also want to make sure that you're creating a narrative around them in your content one of my favorite books ever is made to stick by Chip and Dan Heath it talks about how as human beings we really just crave stories so in our tutorial we relied heavily on the narrative of having to get blue the Velociraptor off of the island before the volcano erupted and this is particularly important because I'm working with a game engine this isn't of prebuilt game or I can put them on Rails and I can keep them from doing things this is a template where they can don't do anything they want if a student wants to they could just create a block at the

top of the volcano make it go all the way down past the lava and then race to the finish but we found as soon as we put in blue the Velociraptor and we created the story that you had to get to her and then you had to build bridges and then you had a code the next item to get her across we found that our testers including our adult testers they stopped cheating their way down nearly so often and maybe it really really became willing to place themselves in that narrative and follow along so a nice byproduct of having blue as a part of our narrative was that we got to use her as a really student friendly surrogate for the end user we wanted students to not only think about making games but to think about the person on the other side of the games because I believe that's probably one of the most important skills anybody can have it doesn't even matter if you're going into game development if you're going to being in film if you're gonna be an engineer

trying to think about how somebody else is going to experience your product that's something that's gonna serve you well no matter what career you choose but trying to actually think of this imaginary user and what they want to do adults struggle with that so by putting in blue we could say like hey not only do you have to be able to play your game but blue has to actually get off the island with you so that's what they had to do whenever they played hissed of the game and it worked really really well if you don't have something like blue what usually what I suggest is that you just have them do play tests with each other so you have to be like alright two other people have to be able to beat your level that sort of thing another problem you have a lot of times when you're working with content particularly game engines and codeine is it tend to be extremely technical meaning the more leeway you put in for them to express themselves a lot of times also the more opportunity for a

troubleshooting you're putting in as well but if you don't allow them to explore they're not really gonna understand the concepts you're trying to give them and they're not really gonna feel a lot of agency over it and that's actually one one thing you have to be aware of if you're working with a template the pros that you're gonna have something that looks beautiful it's gonna look a little less like student art but the con is they're not gonna feel as much ownership of it so wherever you can try to give them that ownership if there's a color that doesn't matter let them pick that color let them choose the names of their variables and if you've got fireballs raining from the sky show them how to use other objects to rain from the sky instead of your fireball and that resulted in beach balls and eyeballs and flower pots filing on this guy which honestly doesn't fit our theme of dinosaurs and volcanoes and lava but students when they get to do that kind of thing they have a much better understanding of what tables and arrays actually do and how you can actually put other objects

inside of them and they're also just they're much more proud of something that feels like it's their own alright so you've got them in your content so far they're enjoying it they're expressing themselves a little bit so how do you manage burnout versus porta it's really really similar to the same things you have to worry about in video game design and even in film so if things are too easy they get bored if nothing is happening people get bored if there's no challenge people get bored if you keep ramping up the difficulty and you just constantly have them learning mechanic after mechanic after mechanic or concept definite concept after concept they're gonna burn out our brains don't like working at top speed at op capacity for very very long so ideally you have a nice progression curve and it's a my background being a hybrid between game development education the fact that I see this curve show up in

both places I think it's one of the most fascinating things about living between both worlds so how I take advantage of creating a decent progression curve is I think about the topics that I have sort of place in like what's more pleasing what tends to be easier and I am this person when you're working up game engines a lot of game engines will have built-in tiles or built-in terrain honestly that tends to be more intuitive in most engines people tend to like it feel pretty good about it so rather than putting that just at the beginning I usually will put it somewhere in the middle since it's really satisfying and these as one of the dips in between like the coding sections so I kind of went coding building coding building coding building or the other way around building coding building coding that way they had some lulls in between their brains got to take a break and they got to you know feel a sort of like sit in the topics a little bit longer alright so now I have

them and I want them to go try my more advanced content so as I was saying earlier these creative challenges they're designed for people who are new they're kind of like I don't know maybe I'd like coding maybe I'd like game development but we hopefully are thinking that maybe they'll go take a class or they'll go and take a look at our more in-depth content so the creative challenge is like a taster and then we have curriculum that will actually take you all the way from hello world so this is how you do everything step by step by step so how do I leave them wanting more and that's where for me that's where I think about using peek and theory does anyone know what peek in three is I have a bad prize for you if you do or take a guess all right peek and theory so in theory it's not really a concept that shows up in education a lot and what it comes down to is leave them wanting more and end up a bang so Stanford a long

time ago and I think some other Institute's did these experiments that showed that how you evaluate an experience if someone says what's that movie good what that doctor experienced good or bad you don't just average it out you're not like you know wait up what you do is you remember the extreme weather you loved it or hated it the most and then you remember how you fell at the end and you average out that extreme with how you fell at the end that's peak and theory so you can you can use that to your advantage if you know that telamon brains work particularly if you're working on something shorter or if you want people to just like have good memories of your film or game or whatever it is in my case and pretty much any game engine I've ever worked with not just with roblox once again terrains always a big hit making things explode is a big hit if you're working with Minecraft you put in

all the dynamite if you have something that's just satisfying and blows up it works for every age range I'm talking everyone down for my six year olds up to like the Advanced academies so um I put in the terrain section more as in the middle has a reward after I did some coding so they got to sort of step take a step back and at the end that's when I really let them range fireballs from the sky and it's really satisfying to watch so when they play the game they see all these things and objects that they chose falling out of the sky and blowing things up and hurting people or causing damage I should say that that went really really well okay so Jurassic world creator challenge was our first creator challenge and of course any time you do something there's something you could have done better and we've knew we wanted this to be an ongoing series so at the end of the summer we had a post-mortem to figure

out where we needed to iterate and how we would do that in our second creator challenge okay so we went through the different components that we talked about earlier the template the tutorial as well as how was our actual in-house pipeline and right away when we're taking a look we start seeing these themes that come up so in terms of the tutorial content this is the most important thing there's just too much content so our first time we created over 79 Google Doc pages worth of content that was a little gung-ho on our part for people who are new to development remember these are people who just want to try it out we weren't necessarily sold on it yet which leads me this is probably my biggest takeaway from that when you're creating content ask who you're writing for what your desired goal for is for the learner and then how long do you actually want them to take on it so for Hearst creator

challenge we were crystal clear about who are our intended audience was and what our goal was we want to attract people who had never tried game development before we wanted them to try it out and hopefully become game developers someday but we hadn't thought about how long did we want to spend on it and people would ask we're like I don't know a whole weekend it'd be great as long as they wants but we were delivering a full course meal when what we should have been doing was handing out like a Costco sampler and then you know how like you ever tried a Costco sampler and you're like sure whatever vegan lasagna you're not vegan but then suddenly you're going home with a vegetarian lasagna that's kind of what we were hoping what happened but we were just like me like lasagna go like ah thanks for laughing I appreciate it so for our second creator challenge our story game creative challenge we were much more clear about what our goal was so our once again our audience was ages

10 and up people who were new to game development we want them to consider it as a career and get excited about it and this time we chose a specific time range that we want them to be able to learn all the concepts in we chose 40 minutes and the reason for that is because a standard classroom is 50 minutes and there's also hour of code that happens every year so we want to create an activity that if a teacher wanted to they could adopt into a classroom and within 50 minutes the students first write a story by hand so they're getting a little pre-production there and then they use code for the very first time they type it out in Lua to ask player X questions and get their input stored in variables they then take the players input and they put gaps into their story and they concatenate together does this sound familiar to anybody what is it yes it's it's it's extremely popular so we created this

lost word style game that has a more well-known title and they went over pretty well with both our younger testers and our older testers it was great because a teacher could control how much time a student went through it but at the end anyone who wants to keep writing more they could just keep going with the concept they knew already to internalize it and the great thing about focusing on the content that we were creating was that our completion rates went way up so on our first much longer crater challenge we had really strong portions but no matter what we did if it's gonna be that long you're gonna get a really drastic fall off but when we made it shorter basically all of our content was being used more and what was more interesting even for the equivalent amount of content we're actually still getting better completion rates because they felt like it wasn't just going on forever they could see where things ended a little bit better so it was just

much more manageable for people all right so the second area of our content we found out where we are having issues it wasn't so much like our steps people weren't reporting a lot of issues there but because it was so long and because this is self-paced what we were realizing was we didn't really allow for stopping and starting or for starting over so if I one of my recommendations is if you happen to be doing online content I'm actually not a big fan of walking things sequentially but also make sure you're you're allowing people to know what comes next and get back to it later so all we did was we add it in a TOC we added it in after we launched and as soon as we did that one of the benefits was if someone took a break it can get back to where they left off they also had a clue as to how much was left in the lesson because if you don't

know how much longer you're doing anything you feel really lost if you ever get in a car and so much just like turn left turn right turn left but they don't tell you you go into the grocery store you don't like that so you want to have an idea how long you're gonna be spending on content and how much you have left you had sense progression so the next area we took a look at was the template itself so the template was huge so we actually spent a lot of time on wayfinding and we kept having to create these maps to show you where to put different sections if you see way on the left side or your right side that's where you start it up at the top of volcano and you had to get blue and you had to get through the volcano then you had to get across these rocks and at the same time you're placing objects you're coding you're doing all these things it just was too much and that's what we just kept hearing it was too much I took too much time to actually navigate in 3d

space if you're new to 3d game design it's not as intuitive as if you know most of us have been doing it for years so physically just having to zoom around was distracting to the lessons we were trying to teach as well as we kept having to put in more wayfinding into the template itself because people were getting lost didn't know where to complete which sections of the tutorials so for our second creator challenge I gave a directive that I wanted to be able to cross the entire tutorial within 5 seconds so on the left side I have the Jurassic world create a challenge template which is huge and I couldn't even get into a single screenshots they'll cut off a little bit and on the right side that is the entirety of the template so you drop into this library and I hope you know what you're supposed to be going this great big crystal clear here's the lighting x marks the spot

so you go there you click on the book and a GUI element pops up and this is where you actually place your word game story so and the result of having a much tighter environment like that was one we got to spend a lot more time on the individual elements crafting it but - it was just a lot less distracting from the concepts we were trying to teach so in the post-mortem like I said we also talked a lot about the pipeline process so a few things that I have that we went through it's hard to get meaningful tracking metrics this is one thing that we struggle with what is success so if you do something like this if you want to create a tutorial try to think about is success if they get through the entirety of the content if you've got a lot of content a success if they make it through the first lesson is it if they publish the game because one thing we found has to kind of change the metrics that we thought success was at one point ohmygosh published gates that means we

have done it new games published based off the template but with the second crater challenge even though we had like exponentially higher completion rates and people seem to like it much better we had much lower publishing rates and our theory for that is for the first creative challenge Jurassic world he got to the end and it was like you win so they were like ok we're done we published now for our second creative challenge we intentionally built it so they can learn concepts within a short amount of time but then they're going to have to expand upon it and they weren't publishing it so they've just had to keep working there's also things within it like you're working off an IP partner make sure you're building in time to work with that IP partner like sending approvals back and forth takes time as well as we got requests for localized content one more thing we got a lot of feedback that we just couldn't do anything about one thing that was really interesting is we kept getting complaints that six-year-olds couldn't reach all the keys which I thought was super cute it's like your six-year-olds

are coding a luau so we can't there's nothing we can do to fix that six-year-olds were not our intended audience but I think it was really awesome that they were trying I did feel really bad when their parents were like what can you do what can we do like wait a couple years we do actually have some great partners that will that do some visual scripting so if you've got before take aways from this like please remember more content is not always better really think about who your audience is what they're going to get out of it and how long do you want them to spend on it motivate your learner's with feening and narrative and rewards but don't just throw that at images actually work that narrative and theming into the project as much as possible allow for self-expression so that they can actually internalize the concepts and get some agency over it it'll be much more satisfying to them if they do and don't just keep ramping up the difficulty really think about how you're placing those concepts both for

the terms of difficulty and for actually enjoyment level okay so that's my talk I think we have like three minutes left something like that so if anyone has any questions I can take maybe like one or two questions okay does anyone have a question okay back there when you mentioned publishing is that is that something they can share with friends yeah yeah so when we say publishing you could publish privately or you can publish publicly to the entirety world and you know to see Xbox all of it PS max yeah PC Max and all that okay um so on the topic of self-expression so I work with 8 to 12 year olds I teach game

design through roblox and something that they love playing around with is the toolbox but the problem is that it does so much and yeah so easy to just drag and drop in that like when I'm trying to teach them to build something they just end up getting distracted and start throwing that Ragini's into their world so what are your thoughts on that should we like maybe only allow toolbox at the end or like yeah so there's a few things you can do you can X the toolbox out if you haven't image that you're using or before they start make them exit out of it they are going to find it however so depending on your classroom you could just say they we're not using it we're going to be using it later or you have to complete X amount of stuff and then you can add in what you'd like I also found having how to use the toolbox safely and why isn't like turning it into a lesson like okay don't just throw in helicopters for the fun of it if you've got like a magical fairyland so teaching them how to effectively use the toolbox can help channel that awesome and the second question if you

don't mind so some of the things in real blocks like for example being a checkpoint it's not entirely intuitive with the teams and the colors so so have you found any good ways of reinforcing concepts so like they do the tutorial they see it was but like kids they forget quickly so you have to just let them do it again and again so both kids and adults we don't remember things the first time we do it and that's part of why you have to get think of those progression curves think about how can I do an object or do something and then do it again and do it again or or maybe honestly creating checkpoints isn't so much important as whatever the mechanic is behind it so you just have to decide is that something like you want them to actually internalize it or is it fine they just did it and forgot thank you yeah anyone else okay so thank you guys very very much I appreciate it