With a playlist of more than 25 hours and a guide to using Planet Coaster for education, our 4th grade engineering course will teach your child how to manage large, complex projects.
Goals
Students who followed our curriculum in previous years will already have considerable experience solving small-scale engineering problems. In this grade level, they’ll tackle a major milestone: managing a large project that consists of many interdependent components. As a result, they’ll naturally start discovering some basic concepts from the field of systems engineering!
They’ll accomplish this in the most fun and hands-on way possible: by planning and operating fully functional theme parks within the Planet Coaster video game, with the help of our free Planet Coaster tutorial playlist and an additional Theme Park Engineering playlist that contains more than 20 hours of information about real-world theme park engineering!
Along the way, they’ll also be challenged with numerous smaller quandaries, including:
- Constructing roller coasters and other rides that conform to basic physical requirements
- Maximizing attraction throughput
- Creating theming elements with 3D computer-aided design
- Increasing guest satisfaction
- Managing employees
- Maintaing park profitability
Our guide uses three tools to achieve this:
- A free YouTube playlist filled with information about real-world theme park engineering.
- The Planet Coaster video game.
- An additional free playlist of Planet Coaster tutorial videos that will help your child get the greatest possible benefit from playing Planet Coaster.
The Theme Park Engineering Playlist
Our free Theme Park Engineering playlist contains more than 25 hours of exciting information about roller coasters, theme parks, animatronics, attraction design, and much more!
Regarding roller coasters in particular, students will learn about nearly every major component, including:
- Track types and construction
- Vehicle types
- Lift and launch systems
- Breaking systems
- Block breaks
- Rider restraints
- Wheel systems
- Etc.
They’ll also learn about roller coaster design, maintenance, and operation. All of this is illustrated with some of the most iconic and beloved roller coasters in the world.
We’ve likewise devoted great attention to the calmer side of theme parks, with detailed explanations of dark rides, theming elements, walk-through attractions, and much more. If you take your child to a theme park after finishing this grade level, don’t be surprised if you are rewarded with incessant narration about the inner workings of all the rides. You’re welcome.
Finally, the playlist contains overviews of the structure and design of many of the best theme parks in the world. In order to provide necessary historical context, we’ve included a few legacy parks, such as Disney’s Magic Kingdom; however, we’ve tried to focus on world-class parks at the industry’s cutting edge, such as Dollywood, Cedar Point, Efteling, Europa Park, Universal’s Islands of Adventure, and Tokyo DisneySea.
Planet Coaster
Planet Coaster is a wonderful video game that challenges players with developing successful theme parks of their own. It offers a powerful set of tools for designing parks and creating realistic coasters that (approximately) obey the laws of physics. Children who play the game will naturally pick up a wide range of important engineering skills that simply can’t be communicated through textbooks or rigid lab activities. Playing Planet Coaster won’t just teach your child about engineering – it will teach your child how to be an engineer.
Planet Coaster is available on Steam, so you’ll want to follow our Parent’s Guide to Buying Educational Games on Steam in order to learn how to install and manage games for your child. The game is often available at deep discounts – at the time of writing, it is marked 75% off.
When you first load up Planet Coaster, you’ll see a screen that looks like this:
You can ignore the bottom part of the screen that asks for your contact information, and instead click “Create my Avatar!” This will take you through a brief process where you are asked to design a little person who looks like you and then place the person on a globe. Ultimately, the avatar is largely pointless, and you can just select options randomly. You can change the avatar later, if you really want.
There are a couple good options for getting your child started with the game:
- Students who already have experience playing games like Planet Coaster may want to jump straight into Career Mode. They should begin with the first mission in “Captain Lockjaw’s Buried Treasures”.
- Students with less experience playing management games should instead consider starting with “Sandbox Mode”. In this mode, players have infinite money and can build whatever they like, without worrying about their park ever going bankrupt. This offers a great opportunity to become acclimated to the basic concepts of park management in a low-pressure environment. Players can then try Career Mode after becoming more confident with the game.
The Tutorial Playlist
Although it isn’t particularly difficult to play Planet Coaster at a basic level, some features of the game are genuinely quite challenging – even for adults! We’ve created a tutorial playlist that explains how to play the game more effectively (this is a completely separate playlist from the Theme Park Engineering playlist we introduced earlier).
Some of the videos in the playlist cover advanced concepts that go beyond anything your child needs to do in this grade level. Your child does not need to watch all of the tutorial videos. This is especially true of the final videos by “RubleTrillions”, which explain how to design nice-looking theming elements. These videos are provided purely as a resource for students who want to push their skills further. Most adults playing Planet Coaster don’t know everything that is covered by these videos, and your child doesn’t need to, either.
If you’re not already fairly familiar with Planet Coaster or similar games, we do recommend that you and your child watch at least the first five videos in the playlist. You’ll likely find that this makes it much easier to get started with game.
Enabling the Steam Workshop
If your child does want to follow the more advanced tutorials, you may want to enable “Steam Workshop” in Steam’s Family View. The Workshop allows players to download rides and parks created by other players, and then use them while playing. This feature is not necessary to play the game, but it is used by the later tutorials.
Enabling Steam Workshop does mean that you child could potentially see something objectionable that was created by another player. We haven’t observed this to be a serious problem for Planet Coaster, but it’s entirely up to you whether you feel comfortable enabling this feature.
You can enable the Workshop by exiting Family View in Steam, and then clicking “Steam -> Settings -> Family -> Manage Family View”. Then, under “Online content & features”, check the box next to “Community-generated content”. Finally, click “Next” and follow the prompts in the subsequent menus. Now, when Planet Coaster is selected in Family View, there should be a button labeled “Workshop” underneath the “Play” button. Your child can download rides and parks created by other players, and then use them while playing.
Using this Curriculum
In order to complete this grade level, students should complete the following tasks:
- Watch the entire Theme Park Engineering playlist.
- Earn at least 10 stars in Planet Coaster’s Career Mode. Accomplishing this only requires completing “Beginner” level and “Easy” level missions, but students can earn these stars from harder missions if they prefer. A skilled player could accomplish this task within a few short hours, but inexperienced 4th grade students might need a few dozen hours to earn enough stars.
Students don’t need to accomplish these tasks in any particular order, but we recommend that they work towards both simultaneously. For example, they might watch part of the playlist one day, and then play a bit of Planet Coaster the next.
As the teacher, you should ensure that your child is making progress at an acceptable rate. Students may need some help with Planet Coaster, especially for the first few play sessions. If you child is having trouble with the controls, it might be necessary for you to play the yourself game for a few hours, with your child simply watching. By the end of this grade level, you shouldn’t need to provide much direct assistance.
