Understanding data and the data science process is something that is becoming a critical K12 skill, and closely related to computing education. In this session we’ll walk through a research project that uses MakeCode Blockly as a platform for teaching data and computing.

For over a decade App Inventor has reduced barriers to building mobile apps through its block based programming language. In this talk, I will discuss two new initiatives from the App Inventor team that expand our mission into the AI/ML sphere: the first empowers people to build their own conversational AI agents; the second leverages recent advances in ML-powered code generation techniques to create block programs from natural language.

MakeCode is always looking for ways to extend our API’s to support increased creativity in coding. Join us to learn more about our latest efforts to incorporate a sound editor into MakeCode for the micro:bit via a Blockly field editor.

How customizing fields can help you create languages that are streamlined, powerful, and intuitive.

This talk is going to demo some of the plugins the Blockly team has been working on over the past couple of years and will spend some time looking at the different ways that developers can customize them.

As one might expect, Blockly has evolved from its first iteration over a decade ago. In this talk we will demonstrate a series of snapshots from the earliest days before Blockly was released.