This talk is about a week long accessibility sprint the Blockly team did in November 2020. Our goal was to create a game that a person with visual impairments could play from beginning to end. This talk outlines our goal, what we ended up creating and some findings from the project.

Here is the link to the accessibility demo. The code can be found on GitHub. Just a reminder it is a proof of concept and very rough around the edges.

This talk is about a powerful connection checker plugin that implements generic types and parameterized types.

This video includes the demo and answers to questions received during the talk.

Play with the demo here: http://bekawestberg.me/projects/blockly-nominal-connection-checker/

View the design document here: https://bit.ly/3edfxKt

And email me with comments or questions at this address: bekawestberg@gmail.com

Cort from A Posteriori showed off his open source robotics simulator and explained how it differs from other robot simulators--including by incorporating real-world behaviours such as robots that don't always drive straight. He also explained how his workspace is organized into multiple pages to reduce clutter.

For those interested in Gearsbot, it can be found here: https://gears.aposteriori.com.sg/

If you're interested in how the multi-page is done, there's a simple example here: https://gears.aposteriori.com.sg/test.html

Léo from Vittascience discussed their use of Blockly for education. He showed off custom blocks, including a 2-dimensional matrix block and blocks with +/- signs to add extra clauses.

https://en.vittascience.com/code

Simon spoke about how Marlowe uses Blockly to define and edit financial smart contracts. He showed how they use dynamic toolbox categories to hint to the user how to fill inputs on complex blocks.

https://alpha.marlowe.iohkdev.io/

Anjali from Code.org showed the newly published dynamic connection checker plugin. This plugin adds new inputs to a stationary block as another block is dragged toward it. For instance, a create list block may add an input to make space for a dragging block.

Anjali showed the behaviour and discussed implementation details.

Check out the demo on the plugin samples site.

Neil showed several approaches to executing code generated from Blockly, including step-by-step execution and executing in a shared environment.

As an example of simultaneous execution, Neil showed a music editor with parallel execution--and then live-streamed the resulting music playing on a glockenspiel in his office!

Monica from the Blockly team ran a demo of the workspace search plugin, which adds a search box and highlights blocks that match the search terms.

You can find a demo on the plugins sample page.

The API Request Builder is a new, Blockly-based, developer tool for the DocuSign eSignature REST API. It uses the API’s Swagger file to automatically build the Blockly toolbox XML file, the block descriptions file, and the blocks’ code file.

The result is a new style of API explorer with many features. An open source version of the app is available at https://github.com/docusign/api-request-builder-open-src If you have questions, please contact Larry via LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/larrykluger/

Data Structures & Algorithms (DS&A) courses are challenging due to levels of abstraction involving algorithms’ design and advanced elements of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). This talk presented the tool Blocks4DS, designed to assist students in understanding the Binary Search Tree (BST). The tool uses Blockly and Vis.js to enable students to program the BST operations with dynamic visualizations of the data structure. The talk also presented research on the evaluation of Blocks4DS, with findings and insights on its impact on underrepresented groups, with a focus on non-native English speakers.

https://online-journals.org/index.php/i-jet/article/view/10051

Unleash the power of the API for non developers - using Blockly.

See slides.

Earth satellite orbits, 3D CAD picnic table, and piston engine

Joe leads a coding club for 6th graders and showed some of their extremely complex projects built using Blockly Games Turtle and Movie.

Here are the latest links to the class projects from my 6th grade classes.

Movie: Simple Piston Engine

https://blockly.games/movie?lang=en&level=10#6s7hue

Movie: Better Piston Engine

https://blockly.games/movie?lang=en&level=10#msct3n

Random.numbers

https://blockly.games/movie?lang=en&level=10#vogwpq

Simple Crescent Moon

https://blockly.games/turtle?lang=en&level=10#rebto9

Gravitational Orbit Model

https://blockly.games/turtle?lang=en&level=10#mqaqno

3-D Picnic Table

https://blockly.games/turtle?lang=en&level=10#eyqqk3

Peli from MakeCode walked through their GitHub integration, which allows users to log into GitHub and use it as version control for their MakeCode projects. He also demonstrated a tree diff that they use to show users what code has changed between versions.

Also check out their blog post and video on GitHub for micro:bit extensions.