Project Bloks - Creating A Development Platform For Tangible Programming

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Link: Project Bloks - Creating a development platform for tangible programming

 

 

This project kicked off in 2013, when a small group of interaction designers and programmers in Google Creative Lab got together. We wanted to help get the powerful ideas of computational thinking into the hands of younger kids by building on the long-standing academic research into using tangibles for learning.

 

We started small — doing extensive research into the existing lineage of tangibles, so we could figure out how to push the conversation forward. Pretty soon the project gathered pace, garnering interest from Google’s Education and Research teams, and along the way we developed relationships with Paulo Blikstein, Director of the Transformative Learning Technologies Lab, Stanford, and IDEO, experts in human-centred design.

 

Creating a platform that does the technical heavy-lifting for developers, designers, and researchers means they can focus on innovating, experimenting and creating new ways to help kids develop computational thinking. The project is still in active research.

 

Project Bloks is a collaboration between Research at Google, Google Creative Lab, Paulo Blikstein (Stanford University) and IDEO. Additional member of design team: Arnan Sipitakiat (Chiang Mai University).