{"id":2110,"date":"2026-06-14T17:56:54","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T16:56:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.interactiveclassroom.net\/?p=2110"},"modified":"2026-06-14T17:56:55","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T16:56:55","slug":"my-experience-of-flock-xr-and-teaching-game-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.interactiveclassroom.net\/?p=2110","title":{"rendered":"My Experience of Flock XR and Teaching Game Development"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If you’ve read my blog for a while you will know that I love making games almost as much as I love playing them! I’ve been a huge fan of Scratch since I discovered it as a relatively new teacher, at the time we were using Flowol to teach sequencing and control and the students didn’t find it particularly engaging. Since introducing Scratch I’ve always found game development to be a fantastic medium for teaching coding, as it is so creative and can be open-ended so great for extending students abilities. Games can always be extended, improved or tweaked so are perfect for all abilities and naturally lend themselves to including a range of programming techniques and extension exercises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years later, I discovered Kodu Game Lab. This was quite literally a game changer! I could now introduce my students to 3D games as well! I loved teaching with Kodu so much that I even invited local primary children to my school to create interactive stories<\/a>, delivered game-development outreach projects in London and Wales and won an award<\/a> for my scheme of work<\/a>! Although Kodu is still available, it’s no longer supported and developed by Microsoft which left a large hole for anyone wanting to develop 3D worlds and games with their pupils without the complexity of tools like Unity or Godot! Then . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

. . . along came Flock XR<\/a>; my FAVOURITE discovery at the Digital Schoolhouse Playful Computing Conference<\/a> last year and I’ve been playing with it on and off ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is Flock XR?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Flock is a free and open-source 3D creation software that runs in the web browser.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As you can see from the image above, Flock XR is block-based so instantly familiar if you’ve used Scratch or MakeCode, meaning the children (and teachers) are starting with some prior knowledge to build upon.<\/p>\n\n\n

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With Flock XR you are able to develop and code 3D shapes and built-in assets. You can even combine 3D shapes together to make your own playable items. Here I’ve made a Pacman character by subtracting a cube from a sphere. You can manipulate their positions in 3D space through code or by using the built-in editing tools. Not only can you code all of the objects’ behaviour and create your own functions, there are built-in reusable code snippets to get you started in the classroom, things like controlling a character, for example. I really like that you can also save blocks of your own code as snippets to use again, I found this particularly useful with setting my camera position, I made a snippet to set a top-down camera view and now I can just import it into any project and just tweak as required.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Things I particularly love about Flock XR:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n