What is BlockPy

BlockPy is a very weird thing. I created it in graduate school to fulfill a specific purpose in our Computational Thinking class - to help non-computing students who were just getting started. In the very beginning, we had Blockly generating Python code, and I realized they could execute it using Skulpt right there in the browser. Then I figured, hey, we have the parse tree from Skulpt, I could make it round trip the python code back into blocks. So we did that and it mostly worked. We called it “BlockPy” cause blocks and python. But then we started using it in class, and we realized that the syntax was only a small part of the problem - students would slap together blocks that made absolutely no sense. We were running around answering the same questions about their code over and over again. So then we made the thing that eventually became Pedal, which could check more than just their output but also look at the program structure and give feedback. And that worked pretty well. Once we…