Google’s Blockly visual programming environment

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 15:34:00 -0400
computer-science, fyi, students, undergraduate

Blockly is new web-based, graphical programming language developed by Google. It's graphical in the style of Scratch in that you create a program not as a linguistic object, but by selecting and composing icons that represent control flow constructs, operations, functions, variables and values. It's Web based in that both the program development and program interpreter components are written in javascript run in your browser runs in your browser. There is also the capability of compiling your Blockly program into Javascript, Dart or Python. You can inspect or checkout the Blockly source code from the Blockly source repository or try the Maze demo. In that demo, you construct a Blockly program to solve a simple maze, moving the agent to the designated target.

This is work in progress and there's lots more to make it a good language for instruction or to adapt it for actual use in a special environment. But it is fun to play with and is a good way to engage young people with learning how to program computers. It could also be adapted to provide an interface to allow non-programmars to write simple procedures to control devices or define workflows. You can read more about it in an article on Wired