blockly

It's just a branding wrapper of Blockly, which has been around since 2012: https://github.com/google/blockly and https://developers.google.com/blockly/publications/publicati... I don't really care for these edutech companies that camp on other people's open source technology without even acknowledging it. If you didn't know better you'd think the guy behind this was a genius who invented the whole thing himself, because that's how it's marketed: https://www.patreon.com/edublocks Blockly is also popular in internet-of-things development with packages like UIFlow, since the block interface is so simple and intuitive that it's kind of self-documenting for peripheral components. It's also easy to extend with your own modules if you're so inclined. It's handy to have as a palette of common functions in a hardware stack without having to track

The environment (visual block "coding") reminded me of an environment for developing apps with kids. I think it was developed (see edit) as a university project. Quite good for teaching the necessary concepts and enabling kids to build their first simple apps within an afternoon. Edit: Based on Google Blockly [0]. The university project I was thinking of was MIT App Inventor [1]. [0]: https://github.com/google/blockly [1]: https://appinventor.mit.edu/

Whilst it was never completed, as funding for the program was diverted elsewhere, I worked on a team at a university using Blockly [0] compiling it to Lua, and parsing from Lua back into our specific runtime set of Blockly functions. It could do absolutely everything that Lua could do. We also added a kind of multifile support, using tabbed views to reimplement libraries on the browser side of things (compiling into separate Lua files). The idea was that educators at both ends of the spectrum could convert to and from the same visual representations. The primary school classes the uni were running could use blocks, and slowly move to normal Lua, one feature at a time, all the way up to the first and second year ICT programs for higher ed. Because it could compile to Lua, we could use git and a whole bunch of other tools that already exist

Probably it's made with the same technology used to build Scratch, namely Blocky (https://github.com/google/blockly)

Blockly is definitely open source[1]. Scratch looks like Blockly because Scratch is now written with Blockly :) [1] https://github.com/google/blockly

(Member of the Scratch team here) 1) There's a super useful Scratch Curriculum guide - made by the folks from ScratchEd. http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/resources/scratch-curriculu... 2) Blockly seems to be under the Apache license (https://github.com/google/blockly)