Blockly with Neil Fraser

In this episode I am talking to Neil Fraser, the inventor of Blockly. Blockly is a JavaScript library for building visual programming editors.

Neil works as a software engineer at Google in Mountain View, California, USA - for more than a decade. In his spare time he’s an active maker and tinkerer and also created a variety of open source software.

Neil is also the initial creator of Blockly - a JavaScript library for building visual programming editors. We’ve covered block-based, visual programming in quite a few episodes now, but one can really say that Blockly has had a huge impact on the edtech world, if not even THE biggest impact.

Block-based programming uses interlocking blocks to create code, that means there is no syntax to get wrong such as in text-based coding. Block-based coding is a great way for kids - but also their parents and teachers - to learn about computer programming. The colorful blocks and the built-in validation mechanisms make it easy to create functional programs while reducing the issues that beginners often have.