On Saturday, August 2, 2025, Play Piper participated in the Indy Eleven Block Party Night, hosted by the professional soccer team based in Indianapolis, Indiana. When Seth Kimberlin, Vice President of Marketing & Club Growth, invited Piper to take part in the game’s STEM-focused festivities, it was a fantastic opportunity to introduce Piper’s hands-on learning products to a new and enthusiastic audience.

Piper’s Product Developer, Matt Matz—well known for his innovative teaching methods—truly outdid himself with this project. He created two miniature soccer fields featuring the Piper Make Robotic Rovers as the “players,” each programmed to navigate the field and score goals into the net.

Curious how it all came together? Product Developer Matt gave us a behind-the-scenes look:

When Indy Eleven invited Piper to participate in their Block Party Night and asked if there was a way to incorporate their small foam soccer ball toys into our activity, we got to work brainstorming ways to use our Piper Make kits to create a fun, engaging experience. In the past, we’ve worked on similar projects with other toys – our Beam Break kit is designed to work with a Hot Wheels™ car and track. We began with that same idea and learned that toy soccer balls do roll nicely down a Hot Wheels track. 

We didn’t want to do the same thing we had done before, however. At the same time, we just released our newest version of our Robotics kits, and I thought that this could be an excellent opportunity to showcase them. What if we could make our robots play soccer? 

We were inspired by a foosball table, and so we started with that as the base of our idea: 

The next step was to build the Walker and Rover kits and try them out on a mockup field to see what worked and what didn’t: 

Sometimes prototyping is messy! And that’s okay. 😉 It’s amazing what you can do with just a little bit of cardboard, tape, and stuff that you have around the house. 

Once I had a Rover kit, a Walker kit, two Controller kits, and a cardboard soccer field built, I tried playing soccer with my daughter. Two things became immediately apparent. The first issue was that the wires connecting Rover and Walker kept getting in the way. The robots would need to be wireless. The second problem was with Walker. I love the Walker robot. It might just be my favorite Piper Make kit. But the Walker robot was too slow, and it couldn’t turn around easily. Sadly, I had to give up on the idea of using Walker to play soccer. 

What worked well was to copy the idea of sloped corners from a foosball table so that the soccer ball wouldn’t get stuck in a corner. We also took the opportunity to experiment with the size of the soccer field and determined that a 20-inch by 36-inch playing field would be ideal.

Making the robots wireless was the next challenge. None of our kits or products are wireless currently. We have been exploring it as a possible add-on product. However, it is still in development, and we’re working on all the things needed to make it a robust product. We still have a little way to go before we can sell a wireless adapter for our Piper Make kits. 

We are, however, far enough along in that development that we were able to create a wireless Rover and a wireless Controller just for the Indy Eleven event, so that’s exactly what we did. We have developed some wireless circuits that are good enough for this application, so we designed and ordered a set of Wireless Controllers and Wireless Motor Modules. 

It took about 2 weeks for the Wireless Controllers and Wireless Motor Modules to arrive. Once they did, I began programming them. Because the controllers are still in the development stages, I had to program them using Arduino/C++ instead of Piper Make (block coding). Even though the programming method and language were different, I still followed the concepts taught in our Robotics and Controller tutorials on Piper Make. I also did a battery test to make sure that the Rovers would run for at least an hour on a single set of batteries. 

Once the Rovers and Controllers were programmed, I spent some time fine-tuning each one to ensure they drove (mostly) straight and behaved as expected. Believe it or not, this step took a long time to work through, because it’s entirely trial-and-error to get each Rover tuned. 

I also wanted to build a scorekeeper for each goal. Essentially, a small scoreboard that will flash some LEDs when your Rover scores a goal and displays the score. The good news is that, with the exception of the 2-digit display, this is something that can be made with the Base Station kit. I prototyped a circuit and added a 2-digit display to the breadboard. Then, I carefully connected everything and used a custom Python code block to drive the 2-digit display. Once I was happy with it, I built 4 of them (one for each goal on two different soccer fields) by soldering the parts together.

The scorekeepers work using the same concept as our Beam Break kits. On one side of the goal, there is an Infrared LED that shines a beam of invisible light onto a Phototransistor (a light sensor). When one of the soccer ball toys rolls into the goal, it “breaks” the beam of light. The Phototransistor detects this and tells the microcontroller (the Raspberry Pi Pico) that Walker just scored a point. 

Lastly, since this is a STEM/STEAM-themed activity, it was important that we create a set of posters to accompany the activity explaining what each component does. I also made an online demo of how the Controller’s buttons use binary numbers to communicate with the Rover and placed a QR code for that demo on one of the posters. 

All in all, this was a fun project! The thing I love most about engineering and design is that the best approach is to brainstorm ideas and then dive in and start building them. You get to test your prototypes and quickly learn what works and what doesn’t work. Then, make changes and repeat the process until things are working the way you want them to. 

The Indy Eleven Block Party was a winning moment not just for soccer fans, but for STEM education. By blending creativity, engineering, and a little trial and error, Matt brought Piper Make to life in a way that sparked curiosity and fun for everyone who stopped by. We’re always excited to show how learning through play can open doors—and we can’t wait to bring more experiences like this to classrooms and communities across the country.