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Comment by acbart | Hacker News Reader

I really wish some folks interested in the K-12 space would steal BlockMirror[1] from me and put it in more editors. I have BlockPy[2], but I'm not really trying to move aggressively into that space - I'm just a researcher. Still, I feel like having a dual block/text environment for Python would help make Python way more accessible to younger learners.

[1] https://blockpy-edu.github.io/BlockMirror/docs/index.html [2] https://www.blockpy.com/

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Makecode now has drag-and-drop programming for Python; it's a little different in that it doesn't have the blockly pane, but has a palette of Python commands to drop into the code window. It can also switch between Python & Python (and JS). It makes a pretty good transition path from block coding.

That's nifty. I've seen the "drag text code" a few times, and I think it's an interesting model. Certainly helps with the discoverability problem. I actually had that feature in BlockPy at one point, but I believe my collaborators said it was too confusing for the students.

I did this with Blockly in Reeborg's World [1]; I added it many years ago. What would be the advantage of using BlockMirror over Blockly? Does it support translation?

[1] https://reeborg.ca/reeborg.html

If by "translation" you mean Mutual Language Translation (turns text into blocks, and blocks back into text, as you type/drag blocks) then yes. If you mean "translation between human languages" then less so. It supports whatever you can do with Blockly, minus whatever things I broke adding the MLT support. I'd love a PR to handle other languages, but again... time.

When I click [Go] button in link [1] it hangs for 3 seconds and then deletes all the blocks and replaces them with just a block with the string "test" inside.

That's my hackish unit tester. You can see more information on the console log.

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