Abstract:

In our rapidly evolving technological world, having a solid foundational knowledge of computing concepts is becoming increasingly vital for digital literacy. In particular, there has been an enormous increase in our reliance on internet-based services and applications. From the user-level applications of live digital classrooms, collaborative editing, and note taking tools, all the way down to the wireless embedded sensors that enable municipal utility automation and weather forecasting, distributed (networked) computing has revolutionized the efficiency and convenience of many facets of our daily lives. However, despite the ubiquity of these technologies, distributed computing is often overlooked in K-12 education, and the opportunity for students to gain hands-on experience building internet-powered projects is even more uncommon.

One project trying to counteract this is NetsBlox, a block-based programming environment based on Snap! (similar to Scratch) which adds convenient distributed programming abstractions. NetsBlox simultaneously has a low enough floor to build a simple project visualizing historic CO2 concentrations from the online NOAA Antarctic ice core database with only a few blocks of code, as well as a high enough ceiling to build a fully-functional recreation of Google Maps and Street View with all features programmed by students using Google’s APIs properly abstracted. In fact, NetsBlox has been so successful as an educational tool that it currently has a full, year-long high school curriculum approved for use in Tennessee and currently being piloted.

In this work, we take NetsBlox to the next level with a new NetsBlox Virtual Machine (VM). Traditionally, despite having full access to the internet, students’ NetsBlox projects could only run in the browser on their laptop; however, with NetsBlox VM we can run students’ same project code on practically any device, dramatically expanding the scope of creative projects students can build within the same NetsBlox programming language.

Three new educational platforms are already powered by NetsBlox VM:
1) a smartphone app called PhoneIoT which allows students to program their own devices and access their phones’ sensors remotely just like real-world industrial applications of the Internet of Things (IoT),
2) an embedded platform that allows students to create and program custom internet-connected embedded devices and robots similar to those used in popular Makers projects, and
3) a 3D virtual, collaborative robotics platform known as RoboScape Online that empowers students to create custom virtual worlds and populate them with programmable robots with a multitude of built-in virtual sensors.

Although the second platform is still being developed, the other two (PhoneIoT and RoboScape Online) have already been experimentally tested with multiple classrooms of students; from these results, both platforms showed particularly high levels of engagement, led to a large diversity of personalized projects, and in general sparked increased interest in computer science and technology as a whole. With these tools and the many more that NetsBlox VM makes possible, we hope to inspire the next generation of Makers to fully take advantage of the power of the internet and all of its endless possibilities.

Keywords:

Education, distributed computing, visual programming, embedded programming, constructionism.