A Video Game for Designing Robots, with Dan White

The K12 Engineering Education Podcast

Learning in robotics doesn’t have to take weeks, if you can design, build, and test a robot in hours in a video game. Dan White, CEO of Filament Games, introduces RoboCo, their game meant to teach principles of robotics to players, from the mechanical design all the way to testing in the 3D world. Dan discusses cofounding Filament Games with partners Dan Norton and Alex Stone, what constitutes a good or bad learning game, plans for integrating RoboCo into educational curricula, and more. Related to this episode: • Filament Games: https://www.filamentgames.com/ • RoboCo: https://www.roboco.co/ • Meaningful Gaming in Education, PAX presentation from Ashley Brandin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk1pkwi7X8w • iCivics: https://www.icivics.org/ • Roblox: https://www.roblox.com/ • Besiege: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Besiege_(video_game) • Space Engineers: https://www.spaceengineersgame.com/ • Minecraft Edu: https://education.minecraft.net/en-us/homepage • ‘RoboCo’ Looks to Fuel Interest in STEM by Letting You Build Useful (and Crappy) Robots: https://www.roadtovr.com/roboco-looks-fuel-interest-stem-letting-build-useful-crappy-robots/ • FIRST Robotics: https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc • Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/ • Civilization: https://civilization.com/ • Micro, by Michael Creighton and Richard Preston: https://www.michaelcrichton.com/micro/ Subscribe and find podcast updates at: http://www.k12engineering.net. Support Pios Labs with regular donations on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pioslabs. You’ll also be supporting projects like the Engineer’s Guide to Improv and Art Games, The Calculator Gator, or Chordinates! Thanks to our donors and listeners for making the show possible. The K12 Engineering Education Podcast is a production of Pios Labs: http://www.pioslabs.com.