Well, there is a new tool in town for programming micro devices like the Micro:bit and the AdaFruit Circuit Playground Express and many more! It's called MicroBlocks and was created by a rock star team with experience with creation of such tools as Scratch and Snap!. It’s pretty exciting for a number of reasons. One of them is the wide variety of devices it works with. Another is the Natural Languages it supports.
Live Coding is another interesting feature.
MicroBlocks is a live environment. Click on a block and it runs immediately, right on the board. Try out commands. See and graph sensor values in real time. No more waiting for code to compile and download.
And Multi Tasking.
Want to display an animation while controlling a motor? No problem! MicroBlocks lets you write separate scripts for each task and run them at the same time. Your code is simpler to write and easier to understand
I played with it a bit and it looks pretty intuitive especially for those with previous block programming experience. I made the mistake of trying it without having a device to use with it handy. I have several at home and so I’ll be trying them next week. But I wanted to get the word out so that if people want to try it over the weekend (yeah, I know you don’t have as much free time as you want) or have some students try it out you could.
Sometime next week I want to do a side by side comparison with MakeCode which supports several of the same devices. Some obvious differences are that MicroBlocks supports running the exact same app on different types of devices and that MakeCode has emulators. Since most people only use one type at a time and have physical devices the impact of those differences will be different in different environments.
We are living in exciting times!
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