Project Bloks Is Google's DIY Anything Platform For Aspiring Creators

Google reveals a DIY set of computer parts that connect together to create learning experiences for young coders. Of course you don't have to be a programmer to use these blocks – you can be whoever you'd like to be. Google suggests that Project Bloks is a research project whose aim is "to create an open hardware platform to help developers, designers, and researchers build the next generation of tangible programming experiences for kids."

Google's aim in this project is to push kids to establish computational thinking as soon as possible. That's not anything scary, "computational thinking", it's just an understanding of the idea "if this then that". If you press this button, this thing will happen. If you modify this part of the machine, pressing the button will do something different.

Google's approach is with "tangible programming" – which means kids aren't fiddling with keyboards and actual lines of code, they're learning through touch. They can play with these building blocks physically to understand what building a computer is all about, teaching them computational thinking in the process.

This platform is open.

That means designers, researchers, developers, and whoever else wants to get in on the action can do so.

For more technical information – Google's position on the project, you'll want to read the paper "Project Bloks: designing a development platform for tangible programming for children." You can access this paper through their Research Page. You'll find a variety of inspirations Google had in this project there as well.

According to Google, "Creating an open platform for designers, developers, and researchers will remove the technical barriers that get in their way: so they can focus on innovating, experimenting, and creating new ways to teach computational thinking to kids."

Watch the video above to understand more about why Google is creating this platform and about where it'll be going in the near future.

You can follow the development of Project Bloks and learn more about what's already been made here on SlashGear! Drop in on our Project Bloks tag portal for more!