We released Amphibian, a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA that converts Java code to blocks and vice versa. The initial codebase was branched from the Droplet Editor (used by Pencil Code, Code.org, etc.) that we modified to support various additional languages. Blanchard, J., Gardner-McCune, C., & Anthony, L. (2019, October). Amphibian: Dual-Modality Representation in Integrated Development…
Presenting at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) 2019 Text languages are perceived by many computer science students as difficult, intimidating, and/or tedious in nature. Conversely, blocks-based environments are perceived as approachable, but many students see them as inauthentic. Bidirectional hybrid environments provide textual and blocks-based representations of the same code,…
Jeremiah Blanchard, one of our cofounders, presented his research on hybrid programming environments, those both block-based and text-based, at ICER 2017. Recall that we’ve used PencilCode, Scratch, Blockly, etc. with our students lately. Jeremiah also managed projects that extended PencilCode with support for additional programming languages and curriculum. Blanchard, J. (2017, August). Hybrid Environments: A…
