While there are many educational ‘games’ which aim to teach developers coding, they often fail in being fun and competitive experiences. Frobots, an online game built on the BSV protocol, aims to change this by being both educational and entertaining.
Frobots incorporates elements of NFTs, micropayments, rapid transactions, and the Metaverse, says Founder Jerry Chan. Users write algorithms for their Frobots, fighting each other to death for fun and profit. Chan said the original idea behind the platform came about from a desire to explore the general computational capabilities of the BSV blockchain.
‘I think Frobots is unique because there haven’t been a lot of e-learning games in the past which focus on teaching computer science,’ said Chan. He pointed to classics such as Where in the World is Carmen San Diego on the Commodore 64. ‘While those were really fun, those were always sort of either trivia-based or creative-based, like drawing and creating things like art. And I think the industry hasn’t really moved too much from that place to the present day.’
Educational but also competitive
Chan reiterated that Frobots is competitive by design – pointing to massive esports games such as League of Legends and Counterstrike as examples. He added that the goal is to have top players effectively become athletes as they train to enter tournaments and win bigger pots of prize money.
Users receive experience points by winning battles, or even just surviving, which will eventually allow Frobots to level up and continue developing. He added that users can also make additions and upgrades to their Frobots.
‘What you’re doing is, you are effectively writing code and writing programs,’ said Chan. ‘The better you get at writing programs (the more chance) you have of defeating other people’s programs. This, I believe, is immediately 100% transferable to real-world skills, especially the type of skills that people are going to need in the future.
‘As we go into this age of artificial intelligence, the importance of these types of skills is becoming) very, very relevant.’
Chan said that the target audience is gamers of all ages and first-time coders, but more realistically the game is likely to be picked up by more ‘geeky’ players who have a passion for computers and coding. He added that educational institutions are also likely to see serious benefits from using the game as a teaching tool. ‘I think the real-world benefit of Frobots comes when it becomes a tool by which people in early high school or late elementary school can learn programming.’
Built on the BSV blockchain
Chan said the decision to build the Frobots platform on the BSV blockchain was made because of how inexpensive it is and because it can handle most transactions. The immutable nature of the BSV blockchain is also an important element.
‘The idea is that eventually, you’re building an economy. Not only do you play with Frobots, but eventually you can build upgrade parts. And once you have the ability to build parts as user-generated content, you’re going to need a way to preserve the ownership of this content’, he said.
‘The only way to do that really is through the use of NFTs. And so that’s where the blockchain comes in, just the ability for people to engage in an economy and to own the content they create – own the assets they create.’
He added that the idea is not to have players be investors but that the two shouldn’t co-mingle and that developers should not make their platform decisions on the popularity of the blockchain but rather on what will work.