Some of this is the penetration of G Suite and cheap Chromebooks into the education market. Its more or less the same play that Apple used back in the 1980's and 1990's.

Anyone for Roblox :)

Yes. I remember (nostalgic times) when Roblox + Google docs (for group documents) and Teamspeak where the main way we communicated

I must have gotten old somehow, because I remember Roblox as being that game I put on the iPad for my 5 year old nephews.

Roblox has kind of gone through a number of iterations. There was a time where it was really deep by default (and not much point and click) and knowing a good amount of Lua was useful. It has been around since 2005-2006, long before the iPad existed. I was .. 10 at time of release, it was really fun :).

I (and a lot of my friends) got their first real start with programming using Roblox back in 2006. Most of us now work professionally in software or security, directly as a result of our experience with making games in Roblox, or hacking the game.

Writing exploits for Roblox gave me experience with everything from binary analysis to web security and cryptography.

I've heard similar stories from other people for games like Runescape or Minecraft. It's really astounding to me the ways in which a dedicated enough teenager can take advantage of games to turn them into something really educational.

Also, my handle in Roblox was Aeacus! Hit me up if we ever played together :) I'm sure there's a ton of overlap between HN and the smallish Roblox scripting community of 2006.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

i think your giving it too much credit, this seems like a side project by some aspiring game developer at google,

It's published by Area 120, which is Google's internal "startup incubator". So it's sort of like a side project, but full time for a small group of people.