Google announces ProjectBloks to help kids learn programming

Not many can beat Google at programming. Google not just loves programming; it even wants others to appreciate it as well including kids and Project Bloks is the company’s latest attempt to help people learn the basics of coding.

Announced today, Project Bloks, is a brand new hardware platform that is meant to let developers and educators build physical programming experience that will introduce the small kids to coding and help them take their first steps along the path.

The whole system has been built in collaboration with design firm IDEO and is operated using a small Raspberry Pi Zero-based board that powers the rest of the Bloks. Apart from the aptly named “Brain Board”, two other components called the “Pucks” and “Base Board,” together make up the physical part of Project Bloks.

Although the system is initially aimed at kids, it also makes provision for all sorts of complex coding commands such as branching, which means that the code doesn’t just have to be linear. This is in effect means, that the system could be expanded to teach adult initiates to the art of programming as well.

Paulo Blikstein, the Director of the Transformative Learning Technologies Lab at Stanford University, who assisted Google researchers in developing the system, says, “Imagine what could happen if we had 10 times more people developing ways for children to learn coding and computational thinking: not just the traditional way, but kits that would teach programming in different ways such as making music or controlling the physical world. That is what this platform will enable: make it easy to think outside of the box, without all the technical obstacles.”

The potential for its use by kids to learn programming in innovative ways is definitely very vast. Examples include controlling a drawing bot or even a Lego WeDo 2.0 bot. We are sure that researcher and educators — who are invited to participate in research studies later in the year — will be able to come up with a variety of fun new ways to let kids explore coding.