Blocks & Beyond & Bollockswhywon'tthisstupiddemoload Part II

The demo session also gave me clarification on my two main concerns that I'd been having prior to VL/HCC

1) Should I have just used Blockly? Is it too late to start? ARGH PANIC STRESS
2) So I've got this environment. Great. So what's the research question? ARGH PANIC STRESS

On the one hand, I keep looking at Blockly and thinking "this looks great, why didn't I start off with this? I could have saved so much time. Nevermore, nevermore".

On the other hand, I have this nasty habit of forgetting what my PhD actually IS. I'm making a novel contribution to research, I'm NOT DESIGNING A PRODUCT. Repeat after me. I'M NOT DESIGNING A PRODUCT. I'M NOT DESIGNING A PRODUCT. (This is my morning ritual.)

The Blockly Dilemma
I got the chance to show my environment to a lot of different people, and a question that came up more than once was "So, is this Blockly/Scratch/App Inventor?" For one, it's flattering that people could confuse Jeeves for these professionally developed environments. Additionally, people's surprise that this was developed from the ground-up reminded me just how much work I put into it. This took months of implementation, and the end result is a tool that fulfils its purpose.

So no, it's not as slick or extendible as Blockly or Scratch, and no, it doesn't let me easily port it to the web for ease-of-access and cross-platform usage, but it doesn't NEED these features. It's good enough to let me answer the research question, so why reinvent the wheel just for some extra functionality?

What next?
During Franklyn's keynote on blocks-based languages, he covered a plethora of possible research questions for block-based languages, including learnability, maintainability, and debugging of blocks. Felienne's post summarises the key points very nicely, and Franklyn's kindly put his research questions online. After everything leading up to polishing my presentation, I suddenly found myself wondering where I actually go from here, and this gave me some great direction. More on this in the last post!