Introducing Flock XR

What is Flock XR?

Flock XR is a new block-based 3D creation tool for young people aged 9-14+. Flock XR fills the gap between 2D Scratch coding and professional 3D creation tools such as UEFN/Unreal, Unity, SolidWorks, CLO3D and a whole range of other tools across many industries. 

Why are we creating Flock XR?

Flock XR has been created by Flip Computing, a technology education company founded by three women with a background in the tech industry and computing education. We’re losing girls and creatives from the tech pipeline in KS3 and we’ve designed Flock XR to appeal to a wide demographic. Creative 3D is a relevant and engaging context for learning general computing skills with onward trajectories to many industries. We know that these factors are particularly important to girls. Source: SCARI Computing Report

Accessible to all

Flock XR puts 3D and extended reality (XR) creation into the hands of young people on devices that they have access to. It runs on desktop, chromebooks, tablets, mobile phones and VR headsets. It will also run offline if you don’t have a stable internet connection. Flock XR is free and open source. 

Key features

• Familiar next step for Scratch users

• Play and switch 3D animations

• Program interactive behaviours

• Add and edit objects visually or in code blocks and keep them synchronized

• Pass-through camera for augmented reality

• Integrates with the micro:bit

• Create objects that can be used in Flock XR and 3D printed

• 3D data visualization, data journalism and storytelling

• Runs on a VR headset

How does it link to the curriculum?

Just as Scratch has been proven as effective for teaching the computing curriculum, Flock XR can be used across the curriculum from upper KS2 to KS3 and beyond. There’s ongoing discussion about the need for KS4 computing to be made more creative and Flock XR at earlier stages fits perfectly with this direction. 

Flock XR has been designed to work with a Flock XR JavaScript library that exposes the same concepts so a gradual transition to text-based coding will be supported. Though we note that low code/no code and graphical editors are popular for domain experts across many industries. Text-based coding is not the ultimate destination for all learners. 

We’re currently developing curriculum resources to allow teachers to get started quickly with Flock XR. 

What is the current status?

Flock XR is currently in early access. We’d love you to try it, but be aware that not everything is working perfectly yet. We’d appreciate your feedback and this is an opportunity to feed in at the early stages of an innovative new creative 3D tool. If you’d like to contribute to the open source GitHub project then get in touch.