If you’re looking for a way to sharpen your mind, learn some new skills, and get a little more confident in your abilities, then you might want to try the Google Blockly challenge.
I recently came across this on one of my favorite blogs. It’s a free game that is designed to help you learn some basic programming skills.
You get to play with coding blocks to make games, apps and art. It’s very visual and easy to understand.
The game has several levels to guide you from beginner through advanced skills. There are also opportunities for you to create your own projects and see what other players have done. Just click on the player link at the top of the page.
What I really like about this game is that it gives me a chance to see what programming is like without having to spend years learning how to do it or feeling too stupid when I can’t figure something out. I also like that it’s free because let’s face it – college isn’t cheap!
I’ve been playing around with this for about a week now and so far I’m really enjoying it. It’s just challenging enough without being too difficult (so far). It makes me feel smart when I can figure something out by myself and solve problems that st
For the last few weeks I’ve been taking some time to learn the basics of programming. As a non-techie who enjoys technology and tinkering, I’ve struggled with my own self-doubt and fear of math. I have found that it is possible to learn these things quickly, with the right method and environment.
If you have any interest in learning to code, or if you’re an educator or parent who wants to help young people start learning, I would strongly recommend Google Blockly.
This is a free online tool created by Google to help teach kids how to program. It uses drag-and-drop blocks that represent commands–which means there is no need to type in code (an excellent feature for those who don’t know how to type!). Blockly is also available as an app for iOS and Android devices.
I started out on Codecademy, which has been praised for being one of the best online tools for learning how to program. After several hours of trying to follow their tutorials, I was frustrated by the amount of reading required, as well as the number of syntax errors that popped up (some of which were hard to trace). If you’re looking for an interactive experience that
Google Blockly is a new way to program in your browser. You take blocks from a toolbox, and then use them to build scripts that actually do things. There are no text boxes to type code into, no tabs or brackets. Instead you solve simple puzzles by connecting blocks together.
The only problem with Blockly is that the puzzles are too easy.
I first used Blockly at a workshop run by Mike Tholfsen, one of the developers on the Microsoft OneNote team. He was using it as part of an exercise to create “learning tools”. The idea is that since everyone has different learning styles and different strengths and weaknesses, it makes sense to provide multiple ways for people to learn the same skills.
Blockly seemed like an odd choice for this kind of application: it isn’t designed for learning programming in any formal sense. But we soon found it had great value as a tool for solving real problems – once we ran out of examples to solve, we started working on our own.
I found out about Google Blockly this week and decided to give it a shot. What I found was one of the most challenging but rewarding puzzles I’ve done in a long time.
Blockly is an open-source library that adds coding blocks on top of JavaScript or Python, allowing you to drag and drop them together to make a program. This is great for kids learning how to code – but also makes for some interesting challenges for adults too.
I did the challenge on top of Python and got a little further than halfway through (16/30 levels). I definitely recommend giving it a try, regardless of whether you’re new to programming or not.
If you’re interested in giving it a go, here’s where you can find the challenge: https://blockly-games.appspot.com/?lang=en
Here’s what I learned from doing this challenge:
There’s this thing in my Gmail that I never paid attention to until recently. It’s called “Blockly: A visual programming editor.”
Blockly is an open-source library for building visual programming editors. Blockly is a Google project, used in their App Inventor, and is maintained by MIT. You can use it to create games, apps and more!
I ignored it for years but finally decided to give it a try. And it turned out to be actually really fun and interesting! I was surprised how fast I picked up the basics of coding.
The Basics
At first, the interface looks daunting. There are so many different blocks and options! But once you get over this initial anxiety, you’ll be surprised how simple it really is. Your screen will look something like this:
In 2011, Google launched a web app called Blockly. The idea was to teach kids how to code. But then something surprising happened: adults started using it too. Why? Because Blockly is a fun and effective way to learn programming fundamentals.
The thing I like about Blockly is that it’s a low-commitment way to get started with programming. I’ve tried all kinds of coding courses. Some of them were great, but all of them involved spending at least an hour or two per week for 10-20 weeks. That’s pretty intimidating if you’re not sure how much you’ll enjoy learning about code [1].
With Blockly, however, there’s no time commitment and the barrier to entry is super low. You can try it out for five minutes and decide whether you want to continue or not. If you do want to continue, the learning curve is very gentle and after an hour or two you’ll feel like you’ve made good progress and accomplished something meaningful. And best of all, even though it’s simple, the concepts you learn are fundamental to almost every other programming language out there [2].
How does Blockly work? You move coloured blocks around on the screen to create code and watch as your virtual robot executes your commands
I’ve been interested in programming for a while, but I went through a phase where I would start learning and get discouraged because it was hard. I always thought that you had to be born a hacker to be able to figure out how to program. After I had my son, I wanted to teach him how to code, so I started experimenting with different ways that he could learn.
I first tried using the Python language, but my son couldn’t understand it. He told me that it didn’t make sense for him to use symbols like ‘>>>’ and an arrow (->) when I was trying to teach him about coding. A friend suggested that he try Blockly. Blockly is an open source library for creating visual programming languages (VPLs). It’s similar to Scratch, but instead of creating animations or games you’re using blocks of code to perform tasks on your computer such as saving files and opening web pages. The great thing about this is that it’s accessible not just for children but also anyone who doesn’t know how to code yet or wants an introduction into what coding looks like before they tackle something more challenging like HTML or C++.
I created a video tutorial that explains how easy it is; even if you don’t know anything about