Bluprint by Bitsbox

The good people at Highlights for Children wanted an engaging new experience for their massive community of families and classrooms. We wanted a testing ground for our ideas and technology. Win win! The new site went live on April 3rd, 2023. So far, so great. Avatars animations are usually wicked hard for kids to make. Dance Machine provides a simple interface for posing your people and adds the animation automatically. It works for dances, locomotion, emotes, and everything else that brings avatars to life. What happens when you combine procedurally-generated 3D Zelda-style mazes with Highlights’ gargantuan content library? Puzzle Palace is a series of adventure games where kids battle through mazes and solve puzzles to save the day. Best of all, each new episode only takes a few hours to build and code. Three elements are guaranteed to make any game more fun: Physics, time limits, and valuable rewards. Moon Buggy combines these to provide a traditional beat-the-clock-style driving game that begins with buggy customization and encourages awesome low-g jumps off of lunar dunes. Immersive 3D worlds need avatars, and kids want to create their own. The Character Creator is a place where kids can create themselves, their families, friends, classmates, teammates, heroes, and people straight from their imaginations. Jetpacks and pets included. Worlds, levels, maps: Whatever you call them, kids love creating settings for the stories and games they invent. The Sandblox combines familiar block-based building tools with a huge inventory of vehicles, animals, and other items that anyone can use to model environments and fill them with cool stuff. Kids love quests. In this case, they earn the hamburger to lure the lost dog to collect the reward to lower the drawbridge to get the gear to fix the windmill to recharge the speedboat. Wonky Windmill Adventure Quest is a prime example of the kinds of games that kids can build for their friends to play. Care to draw your own racetrack and try it out while riding a tiger? How about a toilet or a biplane instead? Hilarity is our spin on this entry into the classic racing genre. Multiplayer isn’t built yet, but when it is, there’s no telling what will ensue.

Kids' worlds can be anything they want them to be. Medieval crafting adventures. Adorable petting zoos. Intergalactic scavenger hunts. Places to just play and make crazy stuff with pals. Worlds can be simple places to hang out, or they can use code to be complex games. Everything is programmable. Every world, every car, every panda, every princess is an object with an underlying code file which controls how it behaves. The built-in coding engine is always only one click away. We'll have lots of examples, videos, and documentation to show them how. Kids can create amazing experiences with their friends. Building is collaborative, but so is code editing. Kids can write and edit code together in real time. They see each other as avatars, but they can also use our built-in video chat to see and hear each other live.

In Third-Person mode, you can see yourself as an avatar. The camera automatically follows you as you move around with the arrow or WASD keys. Your mouse controls a visible cursor that you can use to select elements on the screen. First-Person mode will be familiar to anyone who's played Minecraft. There are crosshairs in the center of the screen; you “aim” at anything you want to interact with. This includes blocks (for building) and objects (creatures, vehicles, etc) that you might like to break, build, eat, ride, edit, or otherwise influence. Kids create and modify their environment by adding and breaking blocks which represent different materials. This system is already familiar to hundreds of millions of kids. Less time spent learning how to model means more time for learning how to code : ) Unlike Minecraft, kids can also use blocks to create and edit things like vehicles, animals, characters, furniture, and absolutely anything else. In this “Pixie” mode, objects get bigger and the blocks get smaller and represent colors instead of materials. Need to add something to your world? Organized by category, searchable, and ever-expanding, the Vault contains hundreds of animals, vehicles, characters, furniture, food items, tools, and anything else you're looking for. Use the + button to create your own objects from scratch!

How will coding work in Bluprint?

For years, we've been developing a custom Javascript API for beginners. Bitsbox, our first product, uses it to let kids (millions so far) make their own 2D apps. For Bluprint, we've extended it into 3D, added dozens of new methods, and added a file management system to make complicated projects possible.

How is coding in Bluprint different from coding in Bitsbox?

In Bitsbox, kids type in all or most of the code to create their apps. For Bluprint, we're trying something a little different. Most objects will have pre-typed code with lots of comments that describe what the code does. We'll encourage kids to edit or add to the code to change objects' behavior. This should allow for more compelling action with less typing.

Do kids still code apps in Bluprint?

Instead of coding apps, kids will learn how to use code to bring creatures, characters, and items to life. They'll code enchanted treasure chests and flying boats and talking unicorns. They'll use code to change their worlds' weather, or physics, or overall appearance. They'll even use code to create portals to their friends' Bluprint worlds.

Will Bluprint coding projects be printed?

We're planning to experiment with a combination of printed materials and digital lessons. People love the colorful quality of Bitsbox cards and books, but online tutorials and YouTube videos might allow us to reach more kinds of kids. We'll do whatever works best.