Roblox may be known as a computer game that young people spend hours playing, but it also has relevance to education.
Roblox can be used in teaching to engage students in the lesson and help them develop specific skills, while enjoying the experience. The multiplayer aspects of Roblox allow for learning activities focused on collaboration and communication.
For more information on Roblox, check out What is Roblox and how can it be used to teach? tips and tricks.
The following is a sample lesson plan focused on using Roblox to teach social studies to elementary students.
Subject/Theme: Social Studies/Community and Neighborhood Resources
grade band: Primary school
Learning objective: By the end of the lesson, students will be able to build a community that includes neighborhood-specific resources and services.
Roblox lesson start
Use a presentation tool like Solid, provide students with general information about neighborhood resources in their community. Take advantage of Slido’s interactive polling and live questioning features to allow students the opportunity to actively participate in the lesson.
For example, you can use the open-ended questions feature in Slido to ask students what community resources are present in their neighborhood and/or school neighborhood. Students will name community resources such as the grocery store, library, and post office. For younger elementary students, you can use multiple choice and pre-list some community resources.
Then ask students about other community resources they would like to add to their neighborhood.
Provide an open platform through Roblox for students to create neighborhoods that include the resources they would like to see. You have many platform options to choose from, as Roblox is available through the Google Play Store, Amazon Appstore, and Apple App Store, as well as through Playstation, Xbox, or MetaQuest devices. Microsoft’s website also has an option to join Roblox.
Allow students to take creative license to build their virtual communities. If you want students to work on social skills like collaboration and communication, have them work in teams. Working in teams will also allow problem solving and critical thinking to be part of the learning activity, as you will have to negotiate with each other which community resources to include and why.
Walk through the virtual gallery and class debate
Instead of holding a traditional presentation of each student’s work, coordinate a virtual gallery tour where each student or team can explore their classmates’ neighborhoods. To help with exploration, you could ask students to fill out a form in which they note similarities and differences between their own created neighborhoods and those of other students or teams.
To engage students in design thinking, you could have a whole-class discussion about the virtual gallery walk experience in which you ask students and teams if there is anything they would do differently in the neighborhood designed afterward. to see other examples. This can be a mirror piece or you can have students continue building their neighborhood within Roblox.
What support does Roblox offer families?
The Roblox website has a Students and families section that provides countless resources for parents of students using Roblox, including guides for families to navigate Roblox, the ability to customize parental controls, and information about the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
What happens if students use inappropriate language?
We know that sometimes language use changes when students are in online social forums compared to the physical classroom. Within Roblox’s chat features, there are built-in structures to filter out language that is inappropriate. Additionally, there is an option to report abuse within the Roblox platform.
So yes, Roblox can absolutely be used in formal educational settings for informal learning experiences. In addition to trying to implement the lesson plan described above, check out our article on Creating a Roblox classroom for other learning activity ideas that incorporate Roblox.
