usecase of the backpack?

[Seb Seb]

Hi everyone,

I’m not sure if this issue has already been discussed, or if I’ve posted about it before, but when I had children and teenagers test my new project, they made the following comment: why are there two icons that do the same thing? Even though in one case the block remains and in the other it doesn’t, the behaviour of the bin and the backpack is still the same. And what confuses them is that picking up a block leaves a copy behind (in the bin or backpack).
Shouldn’t we review this plugin to add some new features? Chungi-Fu had been working on this (import/export backpack to/from a file ; import to backpack all workspace ; etc).
And perhaps rethink the bin as well? For example, you can’t restore ALL the blocks from the bin.
I hope this feedback will be useful in improving this plugin.
Kind regards.

[Zoë Spriggs]

Hi, 

The backpack and trashcan have two different purposes: the backpack is a way for users to save blocks for later, the trash can is more a side effect of blocks having been deleted. That said, I can definitely see how a user would see the two as being similar. 

There are a couple of differences you didn’t mention that can affect the user. For example, trashcan contents aren’t persisted when you reload a workspace. Also, the backpack offers some additional features, like Copy all Blocks. 

Since the backpack is a plugin, it gets used and extended in ways outside of our control. Some apps built with Blockly use the backpack as a way for users to store blocks and move them across workspaces. I’d be super interested to hear other use cases that folks have found for the backpack. 

If there are more features you want to see, you can always feel free to submit a feature request! In the meantime, the backpack already exposes getContents() and setContents() methods. You could use these to implement the import/export from the backpack in your own app regardless of whether that functionality ends up in the plugin. 

Best, 

Zoë

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[Seb Seb]

Thanks for your answer, I understand well difference between 'core' and 'plugins'. So I must post features request to enhance this plugins, and help kids to use the right tool (at the moment, the added value of the plugin isn’t clear to them...).

[Mark Friedman]

Seb,

  Just a note that a better place to make official Blockly feature requests might be here.  That way, the request will be officially tracked, commented on, (and maybe someday implemented 😁).

  Take care.

-Mark

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[Seb Seb]

Hi,

thanks for answering but already discussed when I was working on Studio4Education: https://github.com/RaspberryPiFoundation/blockly/issues/5735

So I'll post ideas for the backpack plugin, now that I'm working again on BlocklyDuino.

Regards.

[ewpa...@gmail.com]

> Since the backpack is a plugin, it gets used and extended in ways outside of our control. Some apps built with Blockly use the backpack as a way for users to store blocks and move them across workspaces. I’d be super interested to hear other use cases that folks have found for the backpack. 

We don't use the plugin version in App Inventor, but one enhancement that we implemented for our version that was used in our work in Hong Kong is a shared backpack between students. Teachers would pair students up and each group would get a "backpack ID" as part of their App Inventor session. Getting/setting the contents would update the shared instance on the server, providing a rudimentary form of collaboration by allowing students to pass blocks via the backpack.

Cheers,

Evan

[Seb Seb]

Sounds great! Where can we find it :-D ?