Blockly aims to teach computer programming via a gamified setting in virtual reality. In each level, users have a target 3D structure (e.g., a castle), and they need to exactly recreate the structure by creating a program that generates it. By working through levels of increasing difficulty, users gradually learn core concepts in programming, such as variables, loops, and functions. Most importantly, users learn how to break down complex technical tasks into smaller, more manageable subtasks. When users have finished our tutorial and now know how to program in Blockly, they can then use Blockly to explore the world of generative art in VR on their own.

We have designed Blockly to use a gesture-based language for constructing programs. The goal of the design for this language is to make programming in it feel natural and fun. Check out our project pitch and final demo videos below:

What we accomplished

This week we researched and experimented with some of the available assets for Oculus hand tracking. We found some examples of how others have done custom hand tracking (see notes) and we plan to use this as a starting point as we start developing our custom hand gestures. We finalized our project details and presented the project pitch in class on Tuesday and received some final feedback from the course staff about our idea. We also finished our detailed PRD, where we set milestones and outlined responsibilities for each member moving forward.

What we accomplished

This week we spent a lot of time thinking about and iterating on our design. The team all met each other and we initially decided on pursuing a project called Symbolia which focused on allowing the user to evaluate math expressions and simple programming concepts by allowing the user to draw these in 3D space. We spent a pretty significant amount of time thinking about what project to pursue before deciding on this one, and we created a website and various pieces of concept art for Symbolia, since we thought that this work was due on Thursday. On Thursday, the course staff did not like our idea so we had to start from scratch. We spent a significant amount of time on Thursday and Friday thinking about ideas and how the implementation would look like and we eventually settled on trying to focus on somehwat novel hand tracking technology to teach a user programming concepts.