> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hardfun.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Kids Who Wouldn't Stay on Task - URL: https://www.hardfun.org/off-task/ - Published: 2026-10-13T13:25:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-13T13:25:05.000Z - Description: Roblox can trace part of its origin to what students did with a physics simulator when nobody told them what to build. Four questions for the next kid who drifts off the assignment. - Author: Greg Hayes - Tags: Roblox, education, News, video games I’ve spent my career in games and media. I also help govern a school. Roblox turned twenty in September. I started shipping games on the platform in 2018\. I was in San Jose for the anniversary developer conference, where the keynote ended with David Baszucki honoring Erik Cassel, his late co-founder. Cassel’s widow, Rebecca, joined Baszucki on stage. I think I saw a tear in her eye when she thanked the assembled Roblox community on behalf of her family for continuing Erik’s legacy through their work. She thanked the right people. From its inception, Roblox has run on players making games for one another. The part of the story educators probably don’t know is older than the company. Its founders didn’t invent the behavior that became the platform. They noticed it. Then they encouraged and enabled it. In 1989, Baszucki co-founded Knowledge Revolution, the company behind *Interactive Physics*, a simulated lab that let students experiment with forces and motion on a screen. Cassel worked on the software with him. It was built for physics experiments. The students kept using it to ask questions of their own. In schools and labs, Baszucki told TechCrunch in 2019, “they were all making car crashes and buildings fall down, making really funny stuff.” By the reporter’s account the kids went beyond experiments about mass and velocity. They made games and things to show off to friends. Years later, Baszucki and Cassel started building another physics-based simulation environment. It became Roblox. The company’s prospectus says the founders wanted to recreate, on a far larger scale, the creativity they had seen in *Interactive Physics*. From the front of a classroom, a kid crashing cars in a physics lab can look off-task. I’ve watched Baszucki carry that classroom legacy. At Roblox’s 2024 conference, a developer implored him to enable realistic, computationally intensive physics because a new game needed it. He recounted the platform’s physics roots and acknowledged, almost remorsefully, that it wasn’t on the near-term roadmap. **The behavior that looks off-task helped inspire a platform that Roblox says averages more than 100 million daily users.** **What kids do when we stop directing them** Seymour Papert, whose phrase gives this series its name, spent much of his career arguing that children learn deeply when they build things they care about and test their ideas, then share what they make with other people. He called the approach **constructionism**. Baszucki himself has drawn the line from Roblox to Papert. Announcing an education fund in 2021, he tied what he and Cassel learned from *Interactive Physics* to constructionism and credited the theory to Papert by name. Students took a tool designed for instruction and used it for invention. As I read it, they weren’t refusing difficulty. They were choosing a different kind of difficulty. Schools spend enormous effort trying to get students to persist through hard things. Games, and Roblox in particular, regularly produce the same behavior voluntarily. The lesson I take from Papert and from games isn’t that kids avoid difficulty. They more often avoid difficulty when they have no ownership of it. **Chosen difficulty looks different** Roblox isn’t really one game. It’s a platform holding an immense range of challenges that nobody assigns. Consider *Deepwoken*, a punishing Roblox game in which players can permanently lose a character. (I should disclose that a client of mine, Baobab Studios, has acquired its film and television rights.) No teacher would dare assign it. Players choose it anyway. They learn the systems and compare strategies and ask for advice and fail anyway and start over and somewhere in there they get better. A lost character does not erase what the player learned. Watch someone fail forty times at a challenge they picked themselves and then wave away help because they want to figure it out. That doesn’t mean schools should turn algebra into *Deepwoken*. It means voluntary difficulty deserves more attention than we usually give it. Two episodes ago, I listed five things games understand about learning. Appropriately difficult challenges, useful feedback, recoverable failure, meaningful choice and visible progress. You can find all five on Roblox, though not in every game. But choice changes the chemistry. The student isn’t simply solving the problem. They have decided the problem is *worth solving*. **From playing to building** Playing is the entry point. The more interesting ceiling is making. Some Roblox players cross the line from consumer to creator. They start designing worlds, learning to script, tuning game economies and reading analytics. Some are running businesses before they can drive. A few of them, frankly, are better live-ops producers than people I’ve paid to do the job. Nobody assigned any of it. Papert wanted what children build to live in a community that responds. The platform has that built in. People play what other people make and they criticize it, break it, improve it and tell their friends. A school assignment may have one reader. A thing you build for other people has an audience. Audiences have a useful habit of not caring what grade you hoped to receive. Building might be about to get easier. In September, Roblox gave every creator at its developer conference access to Build, its prompt-to-game AI tool. By the company’s count, 71 percent of the people who made a game with it during its public test had never used Roblox’s development software. Baszucki wrote that the platform and its new AI layer will change who gets to build a game and what building one means. More kids making things would be good news. What building means is the part to watch. I’d put last episode’s question to whoever typed the prompt. What did they still have to do? **What Roblox does and doesn’t prove** Roblox doesn’t prove that constructionism should replace classrooms. Nor is it evidence that minimally guided learning should replace instruction. Students need knowledge, instruction, practice and teachers who know more than they do. One Laptop Per Child tried to carry Papert’s ideas to millions of children and fell far short of its promise, as Morgan Ames documented. The platform demonstrates something narrower. Given real tools, meaningful choice and an audience that actually responds, a lot of young people will voluntarily take on difficult work and sustain effort that can be hard to produce by assignment. **That’s not a curriculum. It’s a dataset about motivation.** That’s the part I think schools should study. Not because Roblox has solved education. Because it is a vast record of what young people choose to do when the assignment disappears. It doesn’t show what children actually learn or whether any of it transfers beyond the game. It says nothing about the kids who quit. **Of course, there’s another side** Everything I’ve described exists inside one of the largest commercial engagement platforms in the world. In August, a Senate subcommittee opened an investigation into child safety there. The company’s age checks and age-gated accounts are meaningful steps. But good intentions are not the same as a clean bill of health. Keeping kids safe is the company’s job. Roblox also contains the best and worst versions of the mechanics I wrote about in Episode 1, sometimes one click apart. A kid can spend an hour debugging a game they’re building. The same kid can spend an hour inside something shaped remarkably like a slot machine. Both show up as sixty minutes of “screen time.” As inputs to a developing mind they could hardly be more different. That’s why I’ve become less interested in the raw number. The hours still matter. What are they doing with the hour? Are they entirely inside someone else’s loop or beginning to build one of their own? Even that line isn’t clean. A young creator can build a slot machine too. The platform won’t make that distinction for you. That’s a judgment call, which is to say it’s parenting. **The off-task kids** For educators and trustees, I keep coming back to the beginning of the story. Two engineers paid attention to what students did beyond what the software was built for. That’s easy to miss in a school. We are very good at measuring whether students completed the assignment. Did they follow the instructions? Stay on task? Meet the rubric? Turn it in on time? Those things matter. Schools could not function without structure. A teacher with a full classroom also has a much harder job than those two engineers had. But sometimes the deviation contains information too. A student ignores the prescribed experiment and builds something more complicated. Another finishes the assignment and keeps going. Another uses the tool in a way the teacher never anticipated. Another becomes obsessed with a problem nobody put on the test. Those moments are hard to standardize and hard to grade, which makes them easy to treat as noise. When a student drifts off the assignment, these are the questions I find myself reaching for. 1\. Can they already do the work that was assigned? 2\. Did they make the task harder, or easier? 3\. What are they trying to figure out? 4\. Who else would want to see what they made? A teacher can only follow a detour if the rest of us leave room for one. Roblox’s history is a reminder that invention often starts with someone noticing what people are doing instead of insisting they do what was intended. The keynote in San Jose ended with a tribute to one of the two engineers who noticed. **The behavior that looks off-task may be the most important data in the file.** Which is worth remembering the next time a kid ignores the assignment and builds something better. If you make games, teach, parent or govern a school, I’d like to hear from you. Where have you watched a kid cross from completing the task to pursuing something that was genuinely theirs? **Further reading:** Seymour Papert, *Mindstorms*; Seymour Papert and Idit Harel, [“Situating Constructionism”](http://www.papert.org/articles/SituatingConstructionism.html?ref=hardfun.org) (1991); Morgan Ames, *The Charisma Machine*; David Baszucki, [“Introducing the Roblox Community Fund”](https://about.roblox.com/newsroom/2021/11/introducing-roblox-community-fund?ref=hardfun.org) (Roblox, 2021); David Baszucki, [“RDC 2026: The World Needs More Play”](https://about.roblox.com/newsroom/2026/09/rdc-2026-the-world-needs-more-play?ref=hardfun.org) (Roblox, 2026); Roblox Corporation, [prospectus](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1315098/000119312521075435/d87104d424b4.htm?ref=hardfun.org) (SEC, 2021); Chris Morrison, [“How Roblox avoided the gaming graveyard and grew into a $2.5B company”](https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/11/how-roblox-avoided-the-gaming-graveyard-and-grew-into-a-2-5b-company/?ref=hardfun.org) (TechCrunch, 2019); James Paul Gee, *What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy*.