Comment by pfooti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pfooti | Hacker News Reader

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While I'm a bit bummed about the general commercialization of some elements of Scratch, I think it's fair to say that there is an encouraging amount of work being done in parallel with Scratch that keeps us from living in a monoculture of blocks.

As examples, the blockly [0] library makes it easier for devs to build blocks-based programming interfaces for a lot of systems. It's been used in App Inventor for building android apps [1], by some of the Code.org (and other) tutorials for hour of code, and excitingly there are some moves to build lego mindstorms programming environments in blockly too ([2] as well as a blog post from google that I can't find right now, ironically, stating they were working with lego on an official one)

There's also snap [3], which started as a project at UCBerkeley to allow scratch users to build their own blocks (e.g., define functions, which was impossible in early versions of scratch), and is, excitingly, written in regular javascript rather than flash (scratch is still a flash app for the most part). There's some legacy notions in snap that make it not the easiest to use (it's all done on canvas elements, and some interface gestures don't work as well as their blockly counterparts, since blockly uses divs and css for blocks), but it's still great and free and open (and works on more devices).

I'm sure there's other stuff out there I'm missing, including classic stuff (like the Boxer programming environment, of which I'm a huge fan), but Papert's legacy measured by the work and people has inspired directly and indirectly is enormous.

0: https://developers.google.com/blockly/

1: http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/index-2.html

2: https://lab.open-roberta.org/

3: http://snap.berkeley.edu/

Adding one more: https://computinged.wordpress.com/2016/06/13/introducing-gp-...

"GP is a new blocks-based programming language being developed by John Maloney (most well-known for developing Scratch), Jens Mönig (developer of Snap!), and Yoshiki Ohshima (one of the developers of Squeak EToys) in Alan Kay’s group. They are all part of the new partnership between Alan Kay and Y-Combinator Research: HARC (Human Advancement Research Community). GP started in the SAP-funded CDG (Communications Design Group)."

Wow. That looks exciting.

I have seen Boxer referenced and it seems like a great idea. Did it lead to something else and if not is there a good reason. I'd like to know more about it but the name makes it hard to search for. Is there a way to run it?

Boxer was the nicest Logo I used. I don't know where you would get it today and you would probably need an emulation of a classic Macintosh to run it. People wanting to extend Scratch should take a look at Boxer because the real problem with Scratch is that it is "flat" while any non trivial system is nested.

Yeah, it's too bad it never really took off. I may be misrepresenting Boxer here (as I was never part of the project, but was a grad student and later lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Education), but my impression was that it was sort of a victim of its avant-garde ideas at the time.

Boxer was a pretty revolutionary programming environment when it was introduced (see [0] for an example paper from 1986). Great computing ideas (object oriented, dynamically scoped variables, visual programming environment), and an amazing space for pedagogical application.

Imagine that instead of a paper notebook, you could write your ideas in a computational medium that could pretty easily create and run dynamic representations. That's something people keep inventing and re-inventing, and Boxer was one of those really early models.

One core problem (again, all of this is IMO) was that the driving force behind Boxer (Andrea diSessa) utilized it in smaller-scale research. That's not to say diSessa's research wasn't really important - it really was. There's a ton of super-important learning sciences contributions to what we know about how people learn, the nature of concepts and misconceptions (calling into question the very nature of misconceptions as a useful category), and how people's ideas change over time. But that's kind of the problem - diSessa used Boxer as a way to create really interesting environments for his research on learning and knowing. It was never given the heavy-duty push that logo and later stuff from the MIT media lab had. For example, Mitch Resnick and Yasmin Kafai co-edited "Constructionism in Practice", which was a pretty good book that showcased a ton of the applications of logo to teaching (and their work tended toward whole-school interventions).

All that said, as of a few years ago, I believe there was both a windows and mac version of boxer and it was still under development. I'm not sure if that's still true- diSessa has retired, and his website seems unreachable now.

0: http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/boxer.pdf

You can read my thesis: http://klotz.me/thesis.pdf

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