Easy prototyping of multimedia interactive educational tools for language learning based on block programming

Teaching in the new Digital Era is getting more and more difficult due to the expanding gap between what students and their teachers see as their media of election. Students would like to be engaged with multimedia educational tools and they need, for their future, to learn the basics of coding. In order to overcome the teachers’ difficulties in creating multimedia educational interactive tools for their students, and to start using coding even in non-scientific topics, an interactive environment based on the metaphor of building blocks, BlockLang, has been built. BlockLang is very similar to block-based programming languages such as Scratch but it has been designed to teach to elementary students English phrases and sentences from the food domain that, if correctly “coded”, will generate a corresponding picture on the tool’s “stage”. The tool, built by a student of a non-technical degree in just a few weeks, has shown to be effective when tested on 2nd grade students. It has been very well accepted by the students and, as a further bonus, it can be easily updated even by people that have no previous knowledge of computer programming.