One path, four stages
Every stage produces the skills the next one needs. Nothing is a detour.
Guided quests
Walkthroughs of modeling real things in Blender — starting on screenshots in the browser, graduating into Blender itself.
Build your robot
Students model their own robot — chassis, grippers, tools — validated against reference designs.
The farm
Robots work a shared virtual farm. Designs compete on yield, efficiency, and reliability over a season.
The garden
Winning designs run on real robots in an indoor botanical garden — checked on daily, remotely, by their builders.
How the learning works
Three modes, with training wheels that come off one at a time.
Mimic — today's live game: click and key-press through real Blender workflows on screenshots, with spoken instructions and a robot guide who stands beside every target. Guided — the same quest inside real Blender, with a companion addon verifying each step against the actual scene. Free build — just the brief, checked at the end.
In Guided mode, assistance is layers the student toggles, and finishing with fewer layers on earns more stars:
- Highlights — the addon points at the next button
- Ghost — a translucent target model in the viewport
- Narration — spoken step-by-step instructions
A platform, not an app
Accounts, classes, and motivation systems that reward real skill.
Kid-safe accounts
Class code + picture password — no student email, no PII. Teachers and volunteer mentors get a progress heatmap of the whole class.
Badges that mean something
Named after real Blender skills — earned across quests by using the actual tools, not by logging in.
The robot is the reward
New dances, expressions, and cosmetics for each student's guide robot — kids grind for their companion, not for a number.
Teams and publishing
Quests support team runs, and every completion offers a one-click share video — the portfolio builds itself.
A companion in real Blender
The addon guides, then verifies: active object, selection, modifier stack, operator history. Progress that can't be faked.
Content records itself
The same addon captures an instructor modeling session — screenshots, inputs, operators — and turns it into a new quest automatically.
The farm, then the garden
Healthy competition, with a living payoff.
The virtual farm runs a real regenerative loop — food waste feeds black soldier flies, flies feed fish, fish and beets make fertilizer — and student robots tend every stage. Competition is about yield, energy, and reliability under a parts budget, so clever design beats brute force. The simulation is a true digital twin: the same telemetry schema as the physical garden.
Graduated designs run on a standardized chassis fleet in a real indoor botanical garden. Students log in daily to a live view of their plot, telemetry, and a time-lapse of what their robot is growing — and queue tomorrow's tweaks through a stewarded safety envelope. Plants grow on plant time: a living thing depends on your engineering.
Roadmap
| Phase | Ships |
|---|---|
| 1 — now | Quest select, stars, local progress (player, narration, guide robot, and session flow are live) |
| 2 | Accounts on Cloudflare D1: class codes, picture passwords, resume, teacher heatmap |
| 3 | Badges, robot unlocks, hints, team runs, share videos |
| 4 | Blender addon: guided mode with verified checkpoints |
| 5 | Ghost layer, instructor recorder, free-build verification |
| 6 | Robot design studio and the "build a friend" quest line |
| 7 | The farm: browser world, block programming, seasons, co-op fields |
| 8 | The garden: real robots, live plots, daily remote check-ins |