Google's Blockly Games • Hacker News Board

Re: Google's Blockly Games

#11

Post by michel-slm » Fri, Aug 22, 2014, 8:21 AM UTC

zorbash wrote: post #4

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.

Re: Google's Blockly Games

#12

Post by chii » Fri, Aug 22, 2014, 9:21 AM UTC

staunch wrote: post #6

Over Quota This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

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

Re: Google's Blockly Games

#13

Post by solocshaw » Fri, Aug 22, 2014, 10:07 AM UTC

staunch wrote: post #6

Over Quota This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

Same here.

Re: Google's Blockly Games

#14

Post by couchand » Fri, Aug 22, 2014, 1:50 PM UTC

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/

Re: Google's Blockly Games

#15

Post by acbart » Fri, Aug 22, 2014, 2:13 PM UTC

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.

Re: Google's Blockly Games

#16

Post by kokey » Fri, Aug 22, 2014, 2:52 PM UTC

marcosscriven wrote: post #7

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.

Re: Google's Blockly Games

#17

Post by NeilFraser » Fri, Aug 22, 2014, 5:08 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #6

Over Quota This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

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

Re: Google's Blockly Games

#18

Post by arikrak » Fri, Aug 22, 2014, 7:19 PM UTC

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.

Re: Google's Blockly Games

#19

Post by skynetv2 » Fri, Aug 22, 2014, 7:48 PM UTC

the turtle looks like logo language.