What is Block Coding?

You must have seen the colorful building blocks at home. I'm sure most of us love building various toys by assembling and puzzling the blocks together and putting creativity into action using these colorful blocks.
Just like you all enjoy playing with and creating various amazing toys using these building blocks, do you all know there is something called “Block coding” where you can assemble logical blocks and build various games and apps. So let’s know more about block-based programming.
Block-based programming is a close cousin of regular programming. It makes use of “blocks” of code that can be dragged and dropped onto a work environment and pieced together to make sensible and meaningful programs to construct animated stories and games. It’s an entry-level activity, where you can gain a foundation in computational thinking through visuals as opposed to coding that is based on text. The main attraction of block-based programming languages is that they expose you to the fun aspects of programming (creativity and design) without requiring you to deal with the less fun aspects (such as syntax and obscure errors). It is suited especially for children since it does not require the memorization of programming syntax, nor does it require tedious typing.
Let’s take an example where we find if the year 2022 is a leap year or not using block coding

This block of code creates a variable “Year” with value 2022, after that, we are checking whether the “Year” is a leap year or not. For this, we add an if-else condition, and if the “Year” is a leap year then it shows “2022 is a leap year” else it shows “2022 is not a leap year”.This looks very creative and interesting. Right? And it is very easy to use and understand too.
So, let’s see some benefits of Block Coding.

Benefits of Block Coding

1. Creativity

Block-based coding uses so much creativity. When we code we can build our own computer games, animation movies, or interactive digital artwork. This involves creating our designs, including animations, and building our own imaginary worlds and characters. It offers a simple, visual, and interactive way to learn code and makes coding fun and appealing for you.

2. Helps to learn code Flow

Block-based coding helps you gain a conceptual understanding of how coding works while developing cool animations, telling stories, or creating games, etc. This way, you can quickly pick up computational thinking which is essential to all programming.

3. Accessible and fast

Block-based programming emerged as the best solution to reduce the time for coding. The idea is to create code in a way that a developer-only has to connect visual “building blocks” in a logical way which reduces the time for coding.

4. Syntax-free programming

Block-based coding lessens the burden of using complex syntax and lets you focus on programming in a fast and clear manner. The code written in visual blocks has strong expressive power and reduces a lot of syntactical errors. Thus it does not depend on syntax as in text-based coding.

5. Problem Solving

We get involved with problem-solving by creating solutions to the given problem. We learn about and practice problem decomposition, i.e. breaking down a big complex problem into a series of small achievable steps.

6. Minimal Frustration

Syntax errors can be incredibly frustrating when learning how to code or teaching coding for kids. It can get in the way of conceptualizing a solution in programming, forcing students to pay attention to the text details rather than the coding concept or the bigger problem at hand. Block-based coding reduces the chances of getting syntactical errors.

7.No Memorising required

In text-based coding, you need to memorize different statements, but block-based programming tends to have a palette of commands to choose from, making memorizing commands unneeded, and therefore easy for beginners to start coding. Thus it reduces the burden to learn complex statements (syntax) that are required in text-based coding.

8. Minimized Code

Since it includes blocks, therefore, a long set of code can be represented in a single block helps to reduce the code size a lot. Hence coding time decreases and it minimizes the code too. And the blocks make the code very much easy to understand.

9. Less Complex

Complex programming is very difficult so to reduce complexity block-based programming is used. It reduces code complexity and helps to make the problem look simple.
10. Another advantage of using block-based coding is that it is known to boost other essential qualities such as imagination, creative thinking, and communication.

So, why us?

We don’t always give you the right answer to a question. We encourage the use of trial and error to find a way to solve the problem in front of us. Experimentation allows us to remember the answer better. We work on the concept of Learning to learn, here you not only learn to code but also learn topics of your syllabus and make games while coding. This helps you learn syllabus topics with coding and makes you more comfortable with it too.

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Happy coding!