The Blippit Journey

Blippit originally started out in the UK ahead of the new UK Curriculum for Computing.  It was created to close the gap for the many children an teachers in the UK who were being excluded from creating exciting app projects and embracing what mobile could offer in the classroom and critically from anywhere a person happened to be. Blippit's founder, John Bidder, is a former teacher,  ICT Advisory Teacher,  School's Adviser for ICT & Computing leader for teachers in training at the University of Manchester.

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Nurturing a culture for coding to emerge without it dominating the agenda

Our view has always been that if you can give everyone the opportunity to engage with app making then interest & talent will percolate around the children who have a propensity for taking on technology & STEM projects. In 2018 we stepped up  the opportunities for coding in our app maker and blogged about them here.

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What does the Blippit journey look like?

We start off with app making in any curriculum context.  It's incredibly easy to introduce the concepts of app making using just drag and drop because at every stage the student gets to preview and modify their app as it grows.  Blippit's App Maker contains many different types of building block 'widgets'.  Younger students can simply drag an drop to both aggregate and create their own unique app.  It's the Writer Widget where we first introduce HTML markup language; the language of the web.  This normally happens at primary level.  Students can move along their journey, still in the App Maker, to using exploring inline Javascript.  We find this happens more commonly at secondary school and not at primary level. As students develop the ability to step back and disaggregate bigger challenges into smaller more manageable chunks we have Blippit Blocks to support them.

Built on Google's popular Blockly application, Blocks gives students a Turtle/Logo environment to explore key computing principles such as 'loops' and 'if' statements. Coding comes in the form of Python which is what each block is actually running behind the scenes.  It's from Blocks that students can then move on and export their program into PureCode Python.  Python is a hugely popular language and Blippit's PureCode Python gives students and teachers the space to explore and develop their code in text based form. Almost exclusively this is something that secondary schools are exploring but surprisingly we do see some interest from primary coding clubs too.