Project Bloks was a research project by Google that had the goal of developing an open hardware platform to help developers, designers, and researchers build the next generation of tangible programming experiences for kids.

By creating a platform that does the technical heavy-lifting for developers, designers, and researchers meant they could focus on innovating, experimenting and creating new ways to help kids develop computational thinking.

[From the Project Bloks website]

“Project Bloks was a research program aiming to create a hardware platform to help developers, designers and researchers build the next generation of tangible programming experiences for kids. Our design research into the benefits of tangible computing began in 2013 and concluded successfully in 2018.

Kids naturally play and learn by using their hands, building stuff and doing things together. One of the benefits of tangible programming is that it makes code physical, so kids can play with it.

Our goal was to help kids develop computational thinking (a set of foundational problem-solving skills) from a young age through coding experiences that are playful, tactile and collaborative.

The project was inspired by previous academic work in the field.”

Click here to read the research solution.