Blog
The latest news from Google AI
Project Bloks: Making code physical for kids
Monday, June 27, 2016
Posted by Steve Vranakis and Jayme Goldstein, Executive Creative Director and Project Lead, Google Creative Lab
At Google, we’re passionate about empowering children to create and explore with technology. We believe that when children learn to code, they’re not just learning how to program a computer—they’re learning a new language for creative expression and are developing computational thinking: a skillset for solving problems of all kinds.
In fact, it’s a skillset whose importance is being recognised around the world—from President Obama’s
CS4All program
to the inclusion of
Computer Science in the UK National Curriculum
. We’ve long supported and advocated the furthering of CS education through programs and platforms such as
Blockly
,
Scratch Blocks
,
CS First
and
Made w/ Code
.
Today, we’re happy to announce
Project Bloks
, a research collaboration between Google,
Paulo Blikstein
(Stanford University) and
IDEO
with the goal of creating an open hardware platform that researchers, developers and designers can use to build physical coding experiences. As a first step, we’ve created a system for tangible programming and built a working prototype with it. We’re sharing our progress before conducting more research over the summer to inform what comes next.
Physical coding
Kids are inherently playful and social. They naturally play and learn by using their hands, building stuff and doing things together. Making code physical - known as tangible programming - offers a unique way to combine the way children innately play and learn with computational thinking.
Project Bloks is preceded and shaped by a long history of educational theory and research in the area of hands-on learning. From
Friedrich Froebel
,
Maria Montessori
and
Jean Piaget’s
pioneering work in the area of learning by experience, exploration and manipulation, to the research started in the 1970s by Seymour Papert and Radia Perlman with
LOGO and TORTIS
. This exploration has continued to grow and includes a
wide
range
of
research
and
platforms
.
However, designing kits for tangible programming is challenging—requiring the resources and time to develop both the software and the hardware. Our goal is to remove those barriers. By creating an open platform, Project Bloks will allow designers, developers and researchers to focus on innovating, experimenting and creating new ways to help kids develop computational thinking. Our vision is that, one day, the Project Bloks platform becomes for tangible programming what
Blockly
is for on-screen programming.
The Project Bloks system
We’ve designed a system that developers can customise, reconfigure and rearrange to create all kinds of different tangible programming experiences.
A birdseye view of the customisable and reconfigurable Project Bloks system
The Project Bloks system is made up of three core components the “Brain Board”, “Base Boards” and “Pucks”. When connected together they create a set of instructions which can be sent to connected devices, things like toys or tablets, over wifi or Bluetooth.
The three core components of the Project Bloks system
Pucks: abundant, inexpensive, customisable physical instructions
Pucks are what make the Project Bloks system so versatile. They help bring the infinite flexibility of software programming commands to tangible programming experiences. Pucks can be programmed with different instructions, such as ‘turn on or off’, ‘move left’ or ‘jump’. They can also take the shape of many different interactive forms—like switches, dials or buttons. With no active electronic components, they’re also incredibly cheap and easy to make. At a minimum, all you'd need to make a puck is a piece of paper and some
conductive ink
.
Pucks allow for the creation and customisation of endless amount of different domain-specific physical instructions cheaply and easily.
Base Boards: a modular design for diverse tangible programming experiences
Base Boards read a Puck’s instruction through a capacitive sensor. They act as a conduit for a Puck’s command to the Brain Board. Base Boards are modular and can be connected in sequence and in different orientations to create different programming flows and experiences.
The modularity of the Base Boards means they can be arranged in different configurations and flows
Each Base Board is fitted with a haptic motor and LEDs that can be used to give end-users real time feedback on their programming experience. The Base Boards can also trigger audio feedback from the Brain Board’s built-in speaker.
Brain Board: control any device that has an API over WiFi or Bluetooth
The Brain Board is the processing unit of the system, built on a
Raspberry Pi Zero
. It also provides the other boards with power, and contains an API to receive and send data to the Base Boards. It sends the Base Boards’ instructions to any device with WiFi or Bluetooth connectivity and an API.
As a whole, the Project Bloks system can take on different form factors and be made out of different materials. This means developers have the flexibility to create diverse experiences that can help kids develop computational thinking: from composing music using functions to playing around with sensors or anything else they care to invent.
The Project Bloks system can be used to create all sorts of different physical programming experiences for kids
The Coding Kit
To show how designers, developers, and researchers might make use of system, the Project Bloks team worked with IDEO to create a reference device, called the Coding Kit. It lets kids learn basic concepts of programming by allowing them to put code bricks together to create a set of instructions that can be sent to control connected toys and devices—anything from a tablet, to a
drawing robot
or educational tools for exploring science like
LEGO® Education WeDo 2.0
.
What’s next?
We are looking for participants (educators, developers, parents and researchers) from around the world who would like to help shape the future of Computer Science education by remotely taking part in our research studies later in the year. If you would like to be part of our research study or simply receive updates on the project, please
sign up
.
If you want more context and detail on Project Bloks, you can read our
position paper.
Finally, a big thank you to the team beyond Google who’ve helped us get this far—including the pioneers of tangible learning and programming who’ve inspired us and informed so much of our thinking.
Labels
accessibility
ACL
ACM
Acoustic Modeling
Adaptive Data Analysis
ads
adsense
adwords
Africa
AI
AI for Social Good
Algorithms
Android
Android Wear
API
App Engine
App Inventor
April Fools
Art
Audio
Augmented Reality
Australia
Automatic Speech Recognition
AutoML
Awards
BigQuery
Cantonese
Chemistry
China
Chrome
Cloud Computing
Collaboration
Compression
Computational Imaging
Computational Photography
Computer Science
Computer Vision
conference
conferences
Conservation
correlate
Course Builder
crowd-sourcing
CVPR
Data Center
Data Discovery
data science
datasets
Deep Learning
DeepDream
DeepMind
distributed systems
Diversity
Earth Engine
economics
Education
Electronic Commerce and Algorithms
electronics
EMEA
EMNLP
Encryption
entities
Entity Salience
Environment
Europe
Exacycle
Expander
Faculty Institute
Faculty Summit
Flu Trends
Fusion Tables
gamification
Gboard
Gmail
Google Accelerated Science
Google Books
Google Brain
Google Cloud Platform
Google Docs
Google Drive
Google Genomics
Google Maps
Google Photos
Google Play Apps
Google Science Fair
Google Sheets
Google Translate
Google Trips
Google Voice Search
Google+
Government
grants
Graph
Graph Mining
Hardware
HCI
Health
High Dynamic Range Imaging
ICCV
ICLR
ICML
ICSE
Image Annotation
Image Classification
Image Processing
Inbox
India
Information Retrieval
internationalization
Internet of Things
Interspeech
IPython
Journalism
jsm
jsm2011
K-12
Kaggle
KDD
Keyboard Input
Klingon
Korean
Labs
Linear Optimization
localization
Low-Light Photography
Machine Hearing
Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning
Machine Perception
Machine Translation
Magenta
MapReduce
market algorithms
Market Research
Mixed Reality
ML
ML Fairness
MOOC
Moore's Law
Multimodal Learning
NAACL
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding
Network Management
Networks
Neural Networks
NeurIPS
Nexus
Ngram
NIPS
NLP
On-device Learning
open source
operating systems
Optical Character Recognition
optimization
osdi
osdi10
patents
Peer Review
ph.d. fellowship
PhD Fellowship
PhotoScan
Physics
PiLab
Pixel
Policy
Professional Development
Proposals
Public Data Explorer
publication
Publications
Quantum AI
Quantum Computing
Recommender Systems
Reinforcement Learning
renewable energy
Research
Research Awards
resource optimization
Robotics
schema.org
Search
search ads
Security and Privacy
Self-Supervised Learning
Semantic Models
Semi-supervised Learning
SIGCOMM
SIGMOD
Site Reliability Engineering
Social Networks
Software
Sound Search
Speech
Speech Recognition
statistics
Structured Data
Style Transfer
Supervised Learning
Systems
TensorBoard
TensorFlow
TPU
Translate
trends
TTS
TV
UI
University Relations
UNIX
Unsupervised Learning
User Experience
video
Video Analysis
Virtual Reality
Vision Research
Visiting Faculty
Visualization
VLDB
Voice Search
Wiki
wikipedia
WWW
Year in Review
YouTube
Archive
2020
Feb
Jan
2019
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2018
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2007
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2006
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Follow @googleai
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
