Inspiration
As a team of educators, we wanted to build an immersive learning experience. We decided to build BitBlok, an app designed to help young people learn the foundations of code and logic.
LEGO programming, Scratch block coding, Kids coding robots (Dash, mBot, Ozobot), Robot turtles game, Programmer VR, Cubetto. These are successful block coding experiences that we built on, taking the ideas to another level with fully immersing the player with mixed reality.
We wanted to use the Presence Platform functionality to physicalize the experience of coding.
What it does
A block coding experience made physically present in the players environment.
Teaching early STEM skills can be dry and intimidating. Bit Blok makes learning block programming fun and interactive in a mixed reality environment! It provides a physical relationship to make the code more understandable because it relates directly to the robots actions. When you place a block telling the robot to move or rotate, you first have to move in the same space yourself, reinforcing the understanding of the concepts. It plays like a puzzle game where blocks have to be set to cause the robot to complete a course, or challenge.
Obstacles are placed in the world which add another layer of challenge.
How we built it
It was built in Unity using the Meta Presence Platform and MRUK.
We are utilizing Passthrough, Hand Tracking, Hand Interactions, Scene Understanding.
Challenges we ran into
We began the app in Unity 6 but ran into issues using Oculus Link with the Presence Platform functionality we needed. After porting to the latest LTS, we got it working. We also worked through the challenge of getting the room scan and boundary information we need to limit the playable grid to the viable play space.
Another feature we plan to add in the future if we continue this project is scene understanding integration with the puzzles. We want users to be able to have chairs, toys, and other real-life obstacles be turned into in-game obstacles (like the virtual ones we do have now), and to be able to signal to them where they should place real-life obstacles to make pre-designed levels more immersive. We wanted to use the boundary "obstacle" information in order to do this but we weren't able to find access to that data in the time allotted; we also want to try it with the scene mesh in the MRUK.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The palm menu swipe is an interesting and intuitive new interface for a build menu in our app. And, we built an attractive app with a good level of polish that we believe can be expanded to make it a really useful teaching tool. Having personally taught with many block coding and robotics platforms before, this app could really bring that space to a new layer of reality with Presence Platform! We can see it being a useful tool in reinforcing the concepts in programming and robotics, as well as providing a way for anyone with Quest headsets to teach with physical/robotics block coding without having to purchase new tech for it.
What we learned
We learned that sleep is over rated, that when you're 90 percent done you have 90 percent left to go and we are not alone in our excitement about the new technologies.
We also learned a lot about the new user experience and interfaces possible with the the Presence Platform and Quest 3.
What's next for Bit Blok
- More blocks! Move and rotate are just a start. We want conditionals, loops, and more.
- Extension to other areas beyond robots/programming. We see our app as a platform which can easily extend into teaching logic (logic gates etc), electronics, and more.
- More gameplay elements. Our puzzles could be as fun and gamified as LEGO Bricktales while still being as rich in learning content.
- Scene incorporation. Turn real-world items into in-game obstacles (we believe we can do this in realtime as well, or by prompting the user with MRUK scene mesh api calls).
- Level build and share tool.
- Level progression.
- Multiplayer - solve with friends or learn alongside a teacher.
- Leaderboards for puzzles.
- Teacher platform to use data from players, aligned with Common Core standards.
We hope to gain funding that will enable us to complete it and make it available on the Horizon App store.
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