The Building Blox project is creating a prototype for a narrative design playground in cooperation with Roblox. Using Roblox Studio, we aim to make a learning tool for high school students that allows them to explore and demonstrate their understanding of key historical events in an interactive and memorable environment. Taking inspiration from Telltale Games, Spore Galactic Adventures, and Bad End Theater, our playground integrates branching narratives with a three-dimensional sandbox style play to help students without programming knowledge build experiences. By building stories through our tool, students are able to practice perspective taking as they take on the role of different people experiencing the same historical moment. Students are also able to exclusively share their experiences and what they’ve learned with classmates and teachers by claiming story plots in a virtual Roblox classroom. To accommodate classroom technology, our product runs on PCs, mobile devices, and Chromebooks. As a demonstration of our tool, we are also developing several narratives focused on the Homestead Strikes of 1892. This demo highlights the flexibility of our branching narrative system and helps to guide our final documentation on the future uses and needs of our project.
