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Will Temple A few months ago, our team began development on what will become the third iteration of our BlockyTalky program editor. It uses the Microsoft MakeCode editor (like the BBC micro:bit editor), also known as PXT, that provides creative programmers the ability to program the Raspberry Pi hardware using a familiar, blocks-based editor suitable for those with little to no programing experience. Currently, we support the GrovePi+ shield for Raspberry Pi 2 and later, but additional libraries (such as Internet messaging!) are forthcoming. Quick Demo The example program below shows the process of building a program that turns an LED on and off on an interval controlled by a knob. Higher values on the knob correspond to a longer interval. How It Works & Details for Developers The editor is hosted on the Raspberry Pi. When you save your program in the browser, the editor sends the code (what you see in the "JavaScript" tab in the editor) to the Raspberry Pi, which compiles and runs the program with TypeScript and NodeJs. Because BlockyTalky 3 programs run in Node, packages for our editor can leverage the wide variety of software libraries that are already available and packaged in NPM, such as the official GrovePi NodeJS software distribution, which we use to enable GrovePi support. Our full set of run-time support libraries provides the blocks that you are used to from micro:bit, so functions such as `loops.forever()` work as you would expect and run asynchronously. If you are interested in developing with us and working on BlockyTalky 3, or if you want to deploy your own BlockyTalky 3 editors, the code can be found on the following GitHub links:
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The Laboratory for Playful Computation is part of the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder.