Distributed Programming with NetsBlox is a Snap! (Abstract Only)

Abstract

NetsBlox is a new collaborative learning environment extending Snap! with a few carefully selected abstractions that enable 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. Conversely, NetsBlox makes distributed programming accessible to beginner programmers using its simple yet powerful visual programming primitives, an intuitive user interface and a sophisticated cloud-based infrastructure. Moreover, the tool enables students to work together on the same project from different computers similarly to how Google Docs operate. This feature enables online collaboration and facilitates new ways to teach and learn programming. By allowing students to create multi-player games, NetsBlox provides increased motivation and is likely to prove engaging to students. By providing access to online public domain data sources, such as weather, earthquake, and air pollution data, in a unified manner, students will be able to create interesting science projects in a number of STEM fields promoting interdisciplinary learning. This technology demonstration will introduce the environment and demonstrate its utility in creating multi-player games, such as Battleship and Tic Tac Toe, as well as highlight two client-server applications that display weather and historical earthquake data, respectively, on top of an interactive Google Maps background. Audience members will be asked to participate in a massively parallel volunteer computing application doing prime factorization of large numbers. The open source public domain NetsBlox environment is accessible at http://netsblox.org.