Visual Playground (Blockly)
The Go Education Visual Playground lets you build programs by snapping blocks together — no syntax, no semicolons, just logic. Under the hood it generates real TinyGo code that you can copy and flash to your badge or board.
It is designed for first-time learners and classroom settings where typing code is a barrier, and pairs naturally with the step-by-step tutorials.
What you can do
- Drag and drop blocks to build a program — no typing required
- See the generated TinyGo / Go code on demand with the To Go button
- Load demo programs (Hello World, FizzBuzz, Gopherino robot, DS18B20 sensor)
- Save and load your workspace as XML
- Copy generated code to clipboard and flash it to your badge or board
Available block categories
| Category | Blocks |
|---|---|
| Logic | If/else, comparisons, boolean operators |
| Loops | Repeat, while, for |
| Math | Numbers, arithmetic, random |
| Text | Strings, print, I/O |
| Variables | Typed variables |
| Functions | Define and call Go functions |
| TinyGo | LED control, sleep, goroutines, string conversion |
| GopherBadge | Button input |
| Gopherino | Movement, distance sensor |
| Sensors | DS18B20 temperature sensor |
| Net/HTTP | Cloudflare Workers, Fermyon Spin |
Building the playground
The playground is compiled from the blockly-tinygo project. Run the following script from the goeducation-site root to build and copy all files:
./update-blockly.sh
This script requires Node.js. It runs npm install && npm run build in ../blockly-tinygo, then copies the compiled output and the full playground UI to static/blockly-playground/.