Beetle Blocks: Visual Code for 3D Design

beetleblocks.com

38 points·wormold··5 comments

Not bad idea of using Scratch type of visual programming (?), for 3d part creation. Is it created to be used by children?

Although, I think OpenSCAD[0] is better (even to be used by children).

[0] http://www.openscad.org

Yeah, it's designed for perhaps middle-school to high school aged students, and perhaps a bit younger, but also potentially intro university classes.

BeetleBlocks is built on top of Snap! (snap.berkeley.edu) which is a re-implementation of Scratch in JS that has full lambdas, continuations (call/cc), first class lists, and bunch of other CS-y ideas in a scratch-like UI.

Nice idea, but i think a bit too visual. less visual and more code for 3d design: vim3D [0]

[0] http://www.vim3d.com/

> Beetle Blocks is alpha software, currently in development. Only the Chrome browser is currently supported

Interestingly it seems to 100% work in Edge.

Note the wording. Supported vs. not supported does not equate to works vs. won't work. Rather it means that if something does not work, they will be less inclined to fix the cause of the problem unless a supported platform is also affected and furthermore, not supported means that even if it does work on an unsupported platform now, there's no guarantee made that it'll work on that platform tomorrow (of course, sometimes supported platforms will be deprecated with a new version but in that case it is common courtesy to give notice in advance).

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