Beginning Blockly

Beta Tutorial

Professional programmers create programs by writing lines of text for a computer to interpret. This is the most efficient process for creating large programs, but it can be hard for a beginner to learn programming concepts and programming syntax simultaneously.

As a beginner, you can get started with a visual programming tool, which lets you create programs without getting stuck over syntax rules. Google Blockly is a good tool for this purpose since it runs online and can generate actual JavaScript or Python code.

This tutorial will go through a series of Google Blockly games so you can learn programming. In Blockly, you drag around blocks to create a program. To get used to the interface, try out this simple puzzle game:

For each animal (green), attach its picture, choose its number of legs, and make a stack of its traits.

Once you've matched everything together, click on "Check Answers".

Note: To separate 2 stacked blocks, drag off the bottom one from the top one.