I was lucky enough to spend a week at Sinclair Primary school. I spent the week there teaching year 6 pupils all about designing their own computer games. I went in with the intention to teach them Scratch and then to get them to make their own game. However the majority felt that Scratch was ‘too babyish’ so they wanted to use Roblox. Roblox is a bit like Minecraft. But Roblox allows its users to create their own games. Its based on the Lua programming language. It attracts young people because its 3d and there is a lot of help with scripting.
There are issues though, because its security isn;t very good – games can be easily hacked into, it needs a very good school network to be able to run and its ‘too easy’. A user can make a game in 15mins which is impressive and uses very little code. This satisfies the user but teaches very little computational thinking.
The pupils I taught did not get away without doing any coding. They all had to do something. By the end of the week a lot of them were converted back to scratch because they understood it more…