Suggested blocks plugin

[Jason Schanker]

Hi everyone,

This fall (and maybe also during the summer), I'll be trying to give my students some real-world experience by having them develop a Blockly plugin. Specifically, I'm thinking that they could create one that would suggest blocks based on a user-entered description. For the training data, the developer would provide some examples of problem descriptions and the block types that would be used. As I want them to get experience developing something that people will actually want to use, I am very much interested in hearing your feedback! The feature request is available here: https://github.com/google/blockly-samples/issues/2386 .

Thanks!

Best,

Jason

[Aaron Dodson]

This sounds exciting! Given the reference to training data it sounds like you're planning for this to be AI/ML-backed?

[Jason Schanker]

Exactly, my thoughts are we'd want to use an interface to give the developer the flexibility of which AI/ML algorithm to use. We could also bundle it with some simple out-of-the-box classes implementing the interface such as a naive Bayes classifier.

[Aaron Dodson]

That sounds great! If you'd like, please do let us know once it's available so we can add it to our plugin showcase.

[ewpa...@gmail.com]

I recall that Lyn Turbak at Wellesley College had a student work on this a few years ago, at least for App Inventor. It might be worth reaching out to him to see if it could be generalized to other Blockly environments.

Cheers,

Evan

[Jason Schanker]

Definitely, that would be awesome, Aaron, thanks!

Sure, thanks Evan, I'll send Lyn Turbak an e-mail.

[Maribeth Moffatt]

This definitely sounds like an interesting use case! The team has discussed having this kind of plugin as an official first-party plugin and it's not something we'd want to adopt in blockly-samples. But it sounds like a great project for your class, and if you own it as a third-party plugin in your own repo we can still add it to our plugin showcase once it's released.

[Jason Schanker]

Hi Maribeth,

Will do! I'll discuss it with my students to determine who will maintain the repository under their account and update everyone on their progress here.

Any suggestions for a different name for this plugin? (I just noticed there was already a first-party plugin for suggested blocks at https://github.com/google/blockly-samples/tree/master/plugins/suggested-blocks, but the suggestions are based on the most used/most recently used blocks.)

Also, while I'm planning to have the students start with suggested blocks based on problem descriptions, time permitting, it may also be good to have suggestions that also incorporate which blocks are already in the workspace. This was something I had been thinking about as well and seems to be the approach of Lyn's former student based on the paper I was directed to: https://repository.wellesley.edu/object/ir839.

Thanks!

Best,

Jason