A block based editor for Python

The transition from commonly used block-based environments to traditional text-based programming systems presents an educational challenge. Solutions to this problem tend to be either purely pedagogical, focusing on developing educational frameworks to assist learners in the transition, or technological and focused on innovative ways to organise the editing of text to support the transition to pure text editing. The difficulty of this transition is in part caused by the need for learners to tackle many changes at once. In this paper we propose a block based environment targeting learners transitioning to traditional programming languages which supports precisely the syntax of the desired text-based language while providing the supportive block-based affordances of the learning environment. In this way it is hoped that the learner can focus on the new syntactic and conceptual material while avoiding the need to also learn the nuances of syntax and text editing. A prototype implementation based on Blockly is described, and application areas are discussed.