CSforAll: EAGER: NetsBlox: Visual Programming Environment for Teaching Distributed Computing Concepts

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Vanderbilt University is building a new collaborative learning environment, called NetsBlox, which extends Snap! with a few carefully selected abstractions that will enable high school students to create distributed applications. In today's interconnected world, it will become increasingly important to have a basic understanding of computer networking and distributed computation yet these topics are rarely covered in K-12 curricula. NetsBlox makes that possible with well-designed visual programming primitives, an intuitive user interface and a sophisticated cloud-based infrastructure. The project aims to find the right programming primitives that are simple enough for students to grasp yet powerful enough to enable them to build non-trivial distributed applications. The abstractions must not hide too much detail and complexity, so students can understand the important underlying concepts. The abstractions must build on each other and on existing concepts in Snap! to present a gradual introduction to the intricacies of the domain. Additional challenges include devising sophisticated collaboration support to enable pairs or teams of students to work together remotely, making it possible for students to run part of their code in the cloud, and identifying and creating the right services, such as a seamless interface to the Sloan Digital Sky Server and Twitter, that will make learning with NetsBlox engaging and motivating. Moreover, the computing infrastructure will be enhanced to be highly scalable, serving serve a potentially global user base and making the end-user programmable environment exceptionally robust to support novice users. Finally, the project will create corresponding novel curricular components.