March 11, 2026
Octane meets playtime
Show HN: Vanilla JavaScript refinery simulator built to explain job to my kids
Parent builds oil refinery game for kids — internet cheers, Firefox gripes, coders beg for code
TLDR: A parent built a kid-friendly refinery game that turns oil processing into tap-to-win challenges. Commenters cheer the teaching approach and nostalgia, while a Firefox bug steals the spotlight and coders beg for the source code, making this both a feel‑good STEM hit and a fresh browser‑war skirmish.
Move over flashcards — a parent just turned oil refining into a tap-happy playground, and the internet is loving it. Taylor Bloomquist’s “The Great Refinery Run” walks kids from crude oil to gas station with mini games like zapping salt, heating towers, and even a “hot swap” emergency where you save a vibrating pump. The creator jumps into the thread saying it’s “a different way to use AI to teach,” not robots lecturing your kids, but tech powering playful context. Cue applause and dad-pride vibes: one fan beams, “You can be proud.”
Then nostalgia crashes the party. A commenter crowns it a “spiritual successor” to 90s corporate legend SimRefinery, sending olds down memory lane. But the real drama? Firefox. One user reports the Desalter level shows nothing in Firefox, meaning you “automatically lose.” Suddenly it’s Browser Wars: Preschool Edition, as folks joke this refinery has a secret boss fight named Mozilla.
Meanwhile, builders swarm the comments asking for the code (“boilerplate, please!”), hoping to remix this into their own classroom games. Between cracking big molecules into smaller ones (that’s how you make fuel) and tapping bubbly acids like it’s Candy Crush for chemists, the crowd’s split between pure delight, bug-hunting fury, and open-source thirst. And yes, there’s a cheeky plug to the kid-friendly book behind it all — Fueling Curiosity — because even refinery heroes need story time.
Key Points
- •Interactive refinery simulator guides users from crude extraction to product delivery through staged mini-games.
- •Includes major refinery units: desalter, distillation, hydrotreating, HF alkylation, catalytic reforming, vacuum distillation, coking, and FCC with fractionation.
- •Operational scenario features a pump vibration alert with a six-step hot swap standard operating procedure.
- •Educational context includes an Amazon-linked book and affiliate disclosure; site targets parents, educators, and industry professionals.
- •Completion message references US daily fuel consumption of 630 million gallons.