The programming environment »Open Roberta Lab« by Fraunhofer IAIS enables children and adolescents to program robots. A variety of different programming blocks are provided to program motors and sensors of the robot. Open Roberta Lab uses an approach of graphical programming so that beginners can seamlessly start coding. As a cloud-based application, the platform can be used without prior installation of specific software but runs in any popular browser, independent of operating system and device.
From the beginning in 2014 until today, we have only managed to update to the latest Blockly once in 2016. The reason for this is that we have made a lot of changes to make Blockly suitable for our purposes.
Now our Blockly version is so old that we can expect it to no longer be fully supported by browsers. So an update is very important!
Fortunately, Blockly has put a lot of effort into becoming an easy-to-use framework for graphical programming blocks. Here are some "new" features:
Python 3 compatibility
no Closure Compiler anymore!
TypeScript
Themes
Extensions
...
Here is an interesting overview about the block's definition over the years
Here is a branch from my work (4 years ago) where I have started an update
From the beginning in 2014 until today, we have only managed to update to the latest Blockly once in 2016. The reason for this is that we have made a lot of changes to make Blockly suitable for our purposes. Now our Blockly version is so old that we can expect it to no longer be fully supported by browsers. So an update is very important!
Fortunately, Blockly has put a lot of effort into becoming an easy-to-use framework for graphical programming blocks. Here are some "new" features:
Here is an interesting overview about the block's definition over the years Here is a branch from my work (4 years ago) where I have started an update