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

范德比尔特大学正在建立一个新的协作学习环境，称为NetsBlox，它扩展了Snap！通过一些精心挑选的抽象，将使高中生能够创建分布式应用程序。在当今相互关联的世界中，对计算机网络和分布式计算有一个基本的了解将变得越来越重要，但这些主题在K-12课程中很少涉及。NetsBlox通过精心设计的可视化编程原语、直观的用户界面和复杂的基于云的基础设施，使这一切成为可能。该项目旨在找到合适的编程原语，这些原语足够简单，让学生能够掌握，但又足够强大，使他们能够构建重要的分布式应用程序。抽象不能隐藏太多的细节和复杂性，这样学生才能理解重要的潜在概念。抽象必须建立在彼此和Snap中的现有概念之上！逐步介绍该领域的复杂性。其他挑战包括设计复杂的协作支持，使成对或团队的学生能够远程合作，使学生能够在云中运行部分代码，以及识别和创建正确的服务，例如与斯隆数字天空服务器和Twitter的无缝接口，这将使NetsBlox的学习更具吸引力和激励。此外，计算基础设施将被增强为高度可伸缩的，服务于潜在的全球用户群，并使最终用户可编程环境异常健壮，以支持新手用户。最后，该项目将创建相应的新颖课程组成部分。

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.