Blockly Language Creation and Applications

摘要

Over the past decade, an increased interest has emerged in block-based languages that have been used to support initial exposure of programming concepts to new learners (children or adult). Such languages can shield initial-learners from some of the frustrations of learning the syntax of a programming language, and allow them to focus on the core computational idea being taught. Blockly is a type of visual block language development kit that allows the rapid construction of new block-based visual programming languages to address a specific pedagogical or content focus. This demo provides a brief tutorial on the steps used to create a new Blockly environment, along with two case studies demonstrating the power of Blockly. The two environments introduced have two different contexts: the manipulation of images via operations on pixels (Pixly), and programmatic control of a Sphero robot (Spherly). Pixly and Spherly serve as a context for introducing how new Blockly languages are created, as well as showcasing the opportunity to use these languages as new educational environments in the context of media computation and robotics. More information can be found at http://outreach.cs.ua.edu/pixly/ and http://outreach.cs.ua.edu/spherly/. This work is supported by an NSF CE21 project and a Google CS4HS award.