There were just so many cool entries from the recent contest we can’t resist posting some more to the blog. Check these out!

Social Studies

The subject was Social Studies. The project was to create a Sumerian village and include a Ziggurat, Low Class, Middle Class, and High Class homes, a market, public buildings, a meeting place, and artifacts.

ROBLOX helped us with this project, because it made it easy, and very fun! We enjoying making this project, and had a good time. It also helped us get a very good grade and we didn’t have to make a poster or 3-D model. The class enjoyed watching our video presentation, and so did the teacher! It was hard at times, but we eventually solved the problems. Everyone thought we did a great job. – Piecrust & Just3542

Teacher: It was very interesting and a first for the school!

Parents: It was a really good idea to use ROBLOX!

Art

The assignment was to make a poet with a sculpture that fit well together. I had the choice to draw a sculpture or to use something else. I can’t draw at all and I don’t have much experience with 3D modeling programs, so I decided to use Roblox to create a sculpture.

The sculpture is based on a shower where water streams out of it. The meaning of it is that we sometimes waste so much water that the people, that don’t have clean water, actually could live from it.

My parents were astonished of how good the sculpture was that I’ve made. The teacher was also astonished by it. I got a 9,5 for it. In the USA it is a A- and / or a 95%. A good grade. -Whacka

Weather

This is a tornado project for science. I used black holes to simulate the sucking in of the bricks, and it looks great. It caused a lot of lag, but it was worth it. ROBLOX helped me out a lot with my project. I don’t think that I would have been able to make something so realistic without a photo. This gave me a chance to introduce all of my friends to ROBLOX. It also allowed me understand black holes and the effects of tornadoes. When I explained to them how I made the tornadoes, they seemed amazed that you could do it. I also learned how to put buildings together and enhance my building skills. My teacher gave me a great grade and a high score in creativity. -GamerElite

World History

In my world history class, each of us was given a certain time from the rise of Rome to the end of the Hundred Years War, and tasked with doing a slideshow on this period. Points were given for facts, organization, and a large part to presentation (aka style, creativity). I wanted to do well in all 3 areas, so I was thinking of ways to fit the creativity portion (the area I was most worried about). All clip art had been used to death, so as I was playing ROBLOX I decided to use the game’s bright graphics and extensive building tools to craft images for my slideshow.

I was pleased with the results far more than any other slide show I had done before, and I Aced the creativity portion (the teacher said it was very original). It also allowed me to have fun with the entire process. Overall it shined over all of the basic bullet point slideshows.- saveaseal13

Meteorology

I know I am going to show my teacher this video whenever we get to that part in science. Because the school year just started. But I know I will, but I just hope that the Internet at school  will open by that time. I showed my mom and she was Amazed! She would have never thought that I’m so good at making videos like this. -Crazy3101

History

The project was to make a presentation about the plague in 1666. Roblox was helpful as our history teacher likes us to  be creative when doing projects and to not just write loads of paragraphs on what happened.

Lots of my classmates play ROBLOX and I thought making the presentation here would be fun and entertaining for my mates. The teacher liked it just as much as my mates as it was the only video presentation. I sent the video to my teachers e-mail and she showed it in class using the projector.

Roblox helped further more as I could ‘show’ what happened instead of having just read out what happened. I really enjoyed using ROBLOX to make the presentation and I am very happy with it. It was awarded a 5A by my teacher! – frillydilly

Newtonian Physics

I used Roblox to help me to explain Newton’s laws of motion for my school project. The realistic physics in Roblox allowed me to easily describe the laws with clear examples (as seen in the video). Using friction I easily made a realistic pushable cart to explain these laws. When my teacher saw the video she thought is was “great” and “really cool”. I got an A+ on my project. I think that Roblox allowed me to finish my project quicker and easier and with less effort. I will absolutely want to use Roblox to do other school projects in the future! – Freshbakedpie

Perpetual Motion Machines

Our project/assignment was a science fair project. We had to research something and present it at the fair. My project was  about perpetual motion.

ROBLOX helped me with this project because it allowed me to make examples perpetual motion machines that would not have been as simple to make with real world materials. These were just examples of machines and might not working perfectly in the real world and do not work in ROBLOX because I did not know how to script them to work.  My teacher said that the models were “a good way of showing perpetual motion machines in a simplistic way”. Without ROBLOX I would not have been able to show examples of perpetual motion machines for my project. I got ribbon at the science fair which made me happy. – Rubix47

Biology

I had been asked to make a model for the Digestive system. Sure, it could have seemed easy enough, but of course, there were problems. I was unable to think of a medium for it, and so designed a blueprint I could work on later. Then, I looked at the news post about this contest. I started on work immediately, and even thought of making it into a video, but my microphone had broke weeks ago. I had also polled some other students for their opinion. – Sonichu

Physics

We were supposed to make a Rube Goldberg machine and I didn’t have any supplies to make one, so I made it in ROBLOX. A rube Goldberg Machine is

a machine that does easy tasks in a difficult way. This machine “Pours” bowling Pins into a container. I used the power of Scripting and building to make this. The scripting parts were kind of hard, but it was also fun, just the excitement I had when creating it! VERY FUN!

It was the BEST science project I had to do! I got to show it to the whole class! Nearly ALL of them liked it! – Fireballmario

Ecology

ROBLOX was very helpful indeed when me and my friend got nominated at the graduation ceremony for being the computer experts of the school. ROBLOX for me is the best game I’ve ever played. Our project was about how Rachel Carson fought against the use of DDT. We made a movie project and we both got 100% A’s on it. I cannot imagine any other way how to do that project other than taking a long time building it in Real Life. But with ROBLOX, we got it done in less than 1 hour. Thanks a TON for making ROBLOX.

BONUS: My science teacher nominated us ESPECIALLY at the graduation ceremony for being the ‘geeks’ of the school. 😀 And he also said that our project is one of a kind. – Khainian and poiu18894012

Lua Programming

Subject: Language Arts

The project was an essay consisting of 3 parts: Introduction, a journal of what you’ve done, and a summary of your findings. There was also a 15-minute speech. And we had to interview someone. I decided to do my project on Lua Scripting, even though I’m not good at it. 

ROBLOX inspired me to do this project, because it was where I heard of Lua from. Also, I interviewed FFJosh about Lua Scripting. ROBLOX is an example of a game that uses Lua. – DarthNoob7

Teacher comments: “Interesting info – unique topic – I really don’t know much about this at all.”

Interview with FFJosh

Question 1: How old were you when you learned Lua?

Josh: I only really started messing around with Lua this last year, so I was 18.

Question 2: In comparison to other programming languages, do you find Lua easy to learn?

Josh: I would say it’s pretty easy for someone with a decent understanding of how computer programs work to pick up the basics of Lua. At the same time, Lua does some really strange things that can throw someone off with prior programming experience (such as myself), so that’s something to watch out for. 

Question 3: What function do you use the least, or find the least useful?

Josh: Well, in any programming or scripting language, there’s bound to be a lot of functions and statements you rarely or never use, simply because they’re highly specialized and you never have a use for them. For example, a lot of the math functions do a very specific thing that I’ve not really needed in anything I’ve done yet.

Question 4: What are the major differences between Roblox Lua and normal Lua (Lua 5.1.3)?

Josh: Well, to be honest, I’ve never used Lua outside of Roblox, so I’m not really sure. I think Roblox Lua is a slightly older version than Lua 5.1.3, but I may be mistaken.

Question 5: Why do you like Lua over other scripting languages?

Josh: Well, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t really like Lua over other scripting languages. But it’s also the only thing I can use to script in Roblox. Really, a lot of stuff I do would probably be made easier if I could use Object-Oriented Programming (breaking things into objects with properties and their own functions and allowing them to interact with each other, rather than calling code with that information at different times during the loop), which you see in scripting languages such as Python. But that’s just my opinion, and Lua is also, as I understand it, significantly easier to implement into a program than Python.

I really can’t get over how creative all the projects were. Great job! You can talk more about this contest on our forums.

-ReeseMcBlox