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Google's Blockly Games

blockly-games.appspot.com

61 pointsantichaos18 comments

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Sorry, fixed. We got an unexpected avalanche of interest overnight.

google ought to give this project more free quotas - it's an excellent showcase of a web-application.

Same here.

Seems inspired by http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tip_bar=getStarted which is definitely worth a look.

MIT Scratch is amazing. Much better as an educational tool than CMU Alice -- its 3D-without-gravity environment is unnecessarily complicated yet inaccurate.

I'm surprised no one's been talking about Blockly's educational applications. My professor and I are using it in a course this fall for non-majors, to get them scaffolded through their first coding experience. After all, it lets you generate Python code directly.

Hour of Code used Google Blockly to teach kids the very basics of programming: http://learn.code.org/hoc/1

It would be interesting to create a full course to teach anyone all the fundamentals of programming without any syntax. They could switch to python or javascript when their ready. However, Google Blockly only seems to support the vary basic control structures of programming but not more advanced parts such as Classes.

If you're interested in using this yourself or just frustrated that you can't see it, check out the library that it's built with, Blockly. It's a really neat way to introduce people to programming, and you can also use it for "real" applications. At my previous job we talked about (but never implemented) a business workflow application using it.

https://code.google.com/p/blockly/

This reminds me of the OLPC games. They had the same mechanics and probably also using the scratch programming language.

The interface seems unnecessarily confusing and unintuitive, though the ideas are worthwhile.

Personally I thought it was pretty good functionally.

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The maze game is awesome. Unfortunately it seems the game has gone over quota...

Reminds me of playing with LOGO turtles in primary school, waaaay back in 1982.

Your comment made me find this http://www.calormen.com/jslogo/ and I lost a bit of time there.

the turtle looks like logo language.

Really nice.

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