Google's Project Bloks Will Teach Kids How To Code

(Photo : Google/Project Bloks) Google’s new initiative, Project Bloks, is a new hardware platform that will teach children (5+) how to code.

Google's new initiative, Project Bloks, is a new hardware platform that will teach children (5+) how to code.

Google worked alongside design firm IDEO to build a platform that others can use to code and build their own devices. How does Google plan to use this software for the growth of young coding prospects, however?

Bloks will utilize electronic boards purposed with helping children develop foundational problem-solving skills. The experiences will be playful and tactical, and kids will work together to solve problems.

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

According to Tech Crunch, research for the project has been slow. "It's hard to experiment with tangible programming," wrote Tech Crunch. So what Google plans to do is make it easier for programmers to develop platforms.

"Could we create the technical underpinnings to make it easier for researchers to create tangible programming experiences?" the team asked itself.

Paulo Blikstein, director of the Transforming Learning Technologies Lab at Stanford University, said, "Imagine what could happen if we had 10 times more people developing ways for children to learn coding and computational thinking: not just the traditional way, but kits that would teach programming in different ways such as making music or controlling the physical world.

"That is what this platform will enable: make it easy to think outside of the box, without all the technical obstacles."

Google released a video that showcases exactly how the blocks will work.

Now it remains to be seen how educators, researchers, developers and parents react to the new software. Google is looking for support from all of them, so popular reaction to the initiative will be crucial to its survival. The team published a position paper that gets into depth about the project's goal.