Developing a Blocked Based Language for the Adafruit Circuit Playground
Blayde Dill · 2018
With the integrated use of technology in daily activities, the need for more end-users who can program solutions in their domain of expertise is increasing. There is also growing interest to introduce children to coding activities that are engaging and appropriate for their experience level. Additional resources are needed that initiate and teach computer science in a way that incorporates hardware components to children and first-learners. This poster introduces a new block-based programming environment (called CodePlayground) built from Google's Blockly Developer Tools. The Blockly library injects an editor into an HTML file that represents coding concepts as interlocking blocks, and then outputs the blocks as syntactically correct code. CodePlayground was designed to be compatible with the Adafruit Circuit Playground, which was released as an all-in-one low cost device that can be used for education. CodePlayground allows teachers to utilize the Circuit Playground as an educational device that includes both hardware and software elements. The Circuit Playground uses the firmata provided by Adafruit to communicate with Python code generated by CodePlayground. Blockly Developer Tools was used to create the frame for the language and Atom was used to insert the specialized JavaScript for code generation. After the language was complete, 90 sample programs were created and evaluated to demonstrate the ability of CodePlayground to serve as a programming environment for first learners.