Why learning Game Engines suddenly becomes popular among high school students?

Is youth hackathon a real trend? My 10y-old son and I attended one. We had a lot of fun.

The #XREdu Challenge II was to code an XR project for education or for a greater good on a Saturday (from 9am to 9pm). Its attendees were 80% high school students and several mentors from XR industry. I witnessed high school students picked up VR developer tools under few hours of tutorials and mentorship. Several of them have been using Unity for quite a while and did a group project on how to use immersive experience to reduce stress. I was really impressed that these high school students were very hands-on. They did good presentations and built nice prototypes with web, mobile, and VR technologies. One outlier was this 8th grader said he’s been learning Unity for more than 3 years. This high-quality peer supporting environment was really amazing!

My son Edi (4th grader) and I attended as a team. I loved attending hackathons and workshops. Those were my great memories to prototype quick projects with friends. This time, my teammate is my 10-year-old son. As a former frequent hackathon lover, this is a special moment (at least, I have not seen father and son team before)! I was quite relaxed and decided to have fun as well as hanging out with my son for a full day to build something together.

Building VR/AR apps is a cross-disciplinary coding and coordinating exercise with stress-relieving effect.

It is not easy to build any VR/AR apps. It is certainly more than writing codes because it also involves storytelling, game design, and user experience in a 3D world. From my observation and talking to attendees, here are things I found interesting:

1. Building VR/AR apps is a rewarding experience because one can build a virtual world and experience with others. VR game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine empower game developers to turn their imaginations into places they can visit.
2. Learning game engines requires integrated skill sets of coding and experience design. One can start from either side. Is it harder than coding? Maybe, but it provides immersive feedback for things you built.
3. A beginner can start from placing objects inside a 3D space to learn about 3D geometry, math, and physics from things they can experience immediately. This is my favorite part to provide an introduction for any new game engine learner. Placing objects in 3D spaces provides intuitions about coordinates. Moving objects requires simple maths. Making objects to collide needs to use Newtonian physics. This requires practices and time to be familiar with switching thinking about geometry, math, and physics.
4. Young developers (players) love to create and destroy virtual objects. We can empower them with arts and sciences so that they master them in a deeper level. Placing 3D objects involves concepts like 3D coordinates, rotations, spawn functions, and loops. Destroying 3D objects is adding physics into it, such as understanding mass and velocity, calculating impact force, kinetic energy, and collisions. These are not physics lessons. These are ingredients they need to build a fun game.
5. It added a line to their resume because it is rare to see young developers who accomplished VR/AR projects. Especially, it requires in-depth skills and ideas to complete one.
6. The isolation of being inside VR is stress-relieving. VR provides an undisturbed environment that fully captures the player’s attention. This isolation is sometimes needed. Furthermore, accomplishing a VR project step by step is also a stress-relieving process because of its immersive feedback of the efforts you put in.
7. An VR mentor/mercenary/dad (or mom) is critical to provide guidance whenever is needed (before being frustrated). It is a wonderful experience to build something together with your own kid. Besides, it only requires the entry level of coding, 3D math and physics (I will introduce them later). My son is lucky to have a VR dad as his teammate, but I won’t be too surprised there are more VR mentors to pair with high school students for special projects in the next few years.

From “Dad, can you play with me?”, “can you build with me?”, to “we built it!”

A young kid typically only follows his heart. It took me about 3–4 years to prepare Edi’s mind, heart, and hands to complete a family hackathon. It requires quite some efforts and a good occasion (huge thanks to #XREdu). For a 4th grader, his world is still filled with candies, sci-fi movies and games, and anything that brings him joy and fun. He also likes fancy tech offices with free sodas and junk snacks. Edi was quite enjoying being at the Microsoft Reactor in SF.

How to prepare a 4th grader’s mind, heart, and hands to complete a 12-hr hackathon? I do not have a concrete answer, but here are things I tried:

• 4–5 years ago, we started from 3D games where he practiced to ride a flying dragon in the popular MMORPG.
• About 3 years ago, I showed him Unreal Engine and use SuperGrid to place 3D objects. I setup VR system where he could walk inside things he built. He occasionally played around Unreal Engine.
• About 1–2 years ago, he was banned from playing video games, so we provided him sci-fi novels and audible books. His first audible was Ready Player One (it’s about a world of video games). One of his favorite was the Maze Runner series.
• During past few months, we picked up more Unreal Engine (I will talk about this later) and he was very interested in making a maze and felt confident that he could build one.
• We have our Sunday Philz coffee time where I tried some visual ways to show him basic math and geometry to prepare his mind to think in 3D coordinates. Lately, we started talking about object collision because he saw the cool visual effect of an object broken into pieces after physical impact. I think this is a great opportunity to talk about Newton’s Laws in detail so that he can master how to design those virtual collisions in the game engine.

Edi and I had a teammate — Lynn. She is currently a 10th grader who learned Java before. It was a great combination where Edi had not taken any programming class before, but he knows quite a bit of Unreal Engine Blueprint system (a graphical programming that use lines and blocks to build procedures). We worked well together and finished — MathRunner with a 3rd place award out of 10 teams. It was a memorable day and we had a lot of fun.