Honestly that's worked out rather well; my original position paper on meta-design in blocks-based languages is a track that I just didn't really want to go down. As it turns out, there was a boatload of research and discussion on facilitating the transition from blocks to text languages, with some interesting ideas that frankly blew my shaky meta-design proposal away.
Demo time!
The fact I even got to show Jeeves to other people was great in itself. The fact that I got to demo it to Neil Fraser (creator of Blockly), Brian Harvey (co-creator of Snap!) and Franklyn Turbak (the keynote presenter and driving force towards block-based programming language design) was a tremendous opportunity.
Having Neil stress-test the interface was a bit dicey and he brought up the same issues my participants originally had, which I awkwardly haven't corrected yet :S. As the guy who's spent 4 years developing Blockly, which is now used to bootstrap multiple block-based languages (including MIT's App Inventor), he knows what works and what doesn't, and his position paper Ten Things We've Learned from Blockly is gonna be valuable for improving my own UI.
In general, though, I got really positive feedback on having implemented my own block-based environment from scratch (NOT Scratch. This caused some confusion). Was it worth it, though?
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