Spider World
Back in the days when Logo turtle graphics was the king of the hill in the world of educational computing a colleague and I agreed that having to understand geometry before you could create programs was an artificial barrier. He came up with the idea of a turtle-like entity that existed in an orthogonal world so that turning didn't require angles in degrees but simply left or right. He called it a spider. I got excited and implemented a simple version for the Apple II. It painted colors on a grid and it introduced learners to procedural programming. It featured loops, decisions, and procedures -- the basics of algorithn design -- with a super reduced syntax that could be mastered in a few minutes.
I used it in a course at Lawrence Hall of Science and at a community college and wrote a conference paper and a journal article about it.
Recently block-based programming languages (Alice, Snap) have become very popular and I thought I should upgrade Spider World to a block-based environment. Using Google's Blockly as a starting point I was able to craft Spider World in a few days. Adding the tutorial lessons took a couple of weeks. The finished result works very well and I'm really proud of it.
