Final Countdown to Beta Release
We're so excited to announce that the beta release of Hopscotch has been approved for the App Store! We're going to demo at the All Things D conference on Tuesday (tomorrow) and release to the App Store after that.
To catch everyone up: for nearly the past year, we've been building an iPad programming language called Hopscotch. We're super proud of all the work we've done so far. We've designed it specifically for teaching kids to code, and have been very inspired by Scratch to that end.
Hopscotch allows you to create an interactive program on the iPad by dragging blocks of code and dropping them into a scripting area. No typing required. For this first release we focused our efforts on creating an intuitive and beautiful programming experience.
We're not aware of any other products quite like ours. No other programming language has been designed to be used on a mobile interface. So I think we can safely say that, in addition to making a beautiful and "addictive" product, we've also built the first language made specifically to be programmed on a mobile device. That's something that we're really proud of.
Right now the language is still a work in progress. We need if statements and variables to make Hopscotch Turing complete. We also want to do a lot more with hints and tutorials to make the experience of learning how to use the different blocks of code as seamless and unintimidating as possible. We know that people love to share their own creations, and while they can email projects right now, we want to build a better mechanism for doing this.
We're excited to see what our early users come up with. We built Hopscotch so that the kids who use our app can fall in love with programming. We hope, with this beta release, that we're starting on the right foot.