Get Students Thinking About Programming - Create Entries for the Blockly Turtle Graphics Contest

Blockly is Google's web-based, graphical programming tool. Blockly is designed to get people developing small programs by dragging and dropping elements into sequence. Block can be used without knowledge of a programming language and without even touch your keyboard. Google Blockly's interface reminds me a lot of the MIT App Inventor which is based on code originally released by Google. Google Blockly, like the MIT App Inventor, uses jigsaw pieces containing commands that you can snap together to create an application. The blocks can be dragged, dropped, and rearranged as many times as you like.

The Blockly Turtle Graphics Contest invites you to "draw something cool" with the Blockly Turtle app. Submit your drawing and you could win $100 credit for the Google Play store. Entries will be accepted until midnight PST on April 1, 2013.

Applications for Education
Creating drawings for the Blockly Turtle Graphics Contest could be a good way to get students interested in using logic commands to create simple applications. Blockly is relatively easy to understand environment. Blockly doesn't require any typing, just clicking, dragging, and dropping with a mouse or on a touch screen.

Google Blockly - A Visual Programming Language

Thanks to Tweets by Doug Peterson and Jen Deyenberg, this morning I learned about a visual programming tool called Google Blockly. Google Blockly is a graphical tool for designing and testing simple web applications.

Google Blockly's interface reminds me a lot of the MIT App Inventor which is based on code originally released by Google. Google Blockly, like the MIT App Inventor, uses jigsaw pieces containing commands that you can snap together to create an application. The blocks can be dragged, dropped, and rearranged as many times as you like. Google has three working demonstrations of Blockly that you can try right now. There are not any instructions that go along with the demonstrations. One thing that I quickly figured out is that in the demonstrations you need to click on "maze," "control," and "logic" in order to find the jigsaw pieces that you need.

My incomplete maze on Google Blockly. 

Applications for Education
Google Blockly could be a good tool for students to use to play with logic commands in a relatively easy to understand environment. Blockly doesn't require any typing, just clicking, dragging, and dropping with a mouse or on a touch screen.

Blockly is not nearly as robust as something like Scratch or LOGO, but it could be a good introduction to using if-then logic to develop and solve problems.

If you're ambitious and you have the skills, you can grab the open source Blockly code and create your own demonstrations to use with students. Or better yet, have students use the code to develop demonstrations for each other.