Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our platform, our technology and our place in the gaming and technology industries. For those of you who catch up with ROBLOX over the weekend, the Weekly ROBLOX Roundup collects the best stuff to hit our various avenues of publication in the last week. This time: cultivating the next generation of engineers and entrepreneurs on ROBLOX, our Spotlight on the latest and greatest ROBLOX fan site, a series of visually stunning ROBLOX places you’ve probably never seen before, how we’re speeding up the “join time” for games and places, our new Nerf game, Roadrunner Canyon by asimo3089 and more. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Learning life skills through ROBLOX

In late February, Code.org published a video, in which several tech-industry luminaries extol the values of being able to write code. While the video has an underlying goal of increasing the prevalence of programming classes in schools, it conveys a bigger message: anyone can learn to code and anyone can position themselves to be a successful engineer. In this article, we look at a few key points made in the video and how they relate to ROBLOX (including the variety of valuable life skills users can gain from our platform).

ROBLOXReviews.com and our chat with its owner

ROBLOX Reviews is the latest and greatest ROBLOX fan site. In the spirit of ROBLOX, it takes a user-generated approach to game reviews, allowing all users to write and publish their thoughts on the games they play. The site sorts games based on their average score and we actually ran an experiment to see whose game sort is more effective: ROBLOX Reviews’ or ROBLOX’s “relevance” sort. You can read the full article to find out who performed better!

Six visually stunning ROBLOX places

There are millions and millions of user-created games and worlds on ROBLOX and only a few of them are popular enough to rise to the top of our games listing. That leaves a lot of great stuff hiding in the corners of ROBLOX, just waiting to be discovered. In this article, we highlight six user-created places that you just have to see. They feature unbelievable construction and imagination.

Pushing ROBLOX place data to players faster than ever

As we dig deep into ROBLOX to improve the quality of the user experience, one of the things we’re improving is our network code. Over the last couple months, we’ve been tweaking our technology and implementing new ___ to reduce join times — the time it takes ROBLOX to load up all the parts that make up a place. You can read about our approach in the full article, Pushing ROBLOX Place Data Faster Than Ever Before.

BLOXcon passes are now on sale!

The time is here: you can now guarantee your spot at all three BLOXcons. For more information about BLOXcon and to get started on purchasing your pass, visit our BLOXcon website!

Want BLOXcon updates as soon as they’re available? You have options. Follow @BLOXcon and #BLOXcon on Twitter, and subscribe to our BLOXcon mailing list.

Other stories from the last week:

• We launched Nerf Battle: Double Your Blasting Target Challenge, a game where you use Nerf blasters to hit tricky targets and compete to score the most points in an open arena.
• We’re running a St. Patrick’s Day sale, where a bunch of green items are available at a discount.

You should play this ROBLOX game

This week, I’ve got something out of the ordinary for you: an adventure-style ROBLOX game called Roadrunner Canyon. The game places you in a dry, Western world with a Red Dead Redemption vibe, then gives you the simple task of finding a way home on the train. You’ll traverse a bunch of territory and find ways to get around obstacles blocking your path — like deep water, a lack of power and not having a train ticket — while the game feeds you clues and cutscenes as you progress. Roadrunner Canyon is clunky, in ways; there are invisible walls, which blow the immersion, and more backtracking than I’d like. But it’s also very charming. You can see the effort asimo3089 put into setting up a story and building a beautiful atmosphere — a place you want to be — and making it all work with multiple people in a server doing the same things. You have to appreciate that. Good work.

Bits