Block Coding: Making Godot Accessible to Learners Everywhere – Endless Foundation – GodotCon 2024

Aspiring game creators face multiple challenges getting into Godot - including having to learn programming for the first time. This new Block Coding plugin provides an on-ramp for such learners, enabling games to be built using a high-level visual programming language, without writing any GDScript. We will discuss the motivation, concept and design behind our learner-friendly block language, and then live-demonstrate creation of a basic game built exclusively with block code. Endless Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to empowerment through education and access to technology. The Block Coding idea originated from our experience engaging youth from underserved communities in game creation learning experiences, where we witnessed learners becoming overwhelmed by the simultaneous challenges of having to learn their way around the intricacies of the Godot UI while also learning programming & GDScript for the first time. With our Block Coding plugin, the challenges of learning GDScript can be deferred or avoided, greatly reducing the cognitive burden placed on beginner game creators. The Block Coding plugin is open source and is available via Godot AssetLib. Endless brings a decade of experience in diverse digital empowerment projects, driven by highly experienced and passionate educators, technologists, and philanthropists. We are eager to collaborate around improving Godot’s accessibility for learners. Please drop by our exhibition booth so that we can help you integrate block coding into your project, demonstrate our other learning tools, and chat about our ideas for building a scalable, collaborative game-making community for aspiring game creators. 0:00 - Talk 8:43 - Live demo 20:01 - Talk 21:36 - Live demo 🔗 https://github.com/endlessm/godot-blo... 🔗 https://www.endlessos.org/game-making 🔗 https://www.endlessos.org/ 🔗 https://www.endlessstudios.com/