January 2019 Summaries

Google's Developer Relations team announced the opening of a new innovation space at 543 Howard St. in San Francisco, designed to foster connections within the developer and startup community through events such as talks, meetups, workshops, and bootcamps. This space will serve as the U.S. home for Launchpad, Google's startup acceleration program, which has successfully graduated 13 cohorts of 241 startups globally since its inception in 2016. The program will focus on AI-enabled solutions in fintech, healthcare, and social good, connecting top Google talent with international startups. Additionally, the innovation space will offer developer-focused programming, including hands-on sessions on technologies like Kubernetes and big data, facilitated by Google engineers and industry experts. Google aims for the space to be a hub for diversity and inclusion efforts in the tech industry, partnering with organizations like Manos Accelerator and dev/Mission to provide technology access to underserved groups. The space is designed with flexibility to support learning, experimentation, and growth in line with its guiding principle of developing and innovating dynamically.

In a collaborative effort to redesign the programming blocks of Scratch, a widely-used block-based programming language for kids, the Blockly team at Google partnered with the MIT Media Lab to transition Scratch 2.0 from Flash to a more flexible and robust JavaScript framework. This partnership, initiated in 2015, leveraged Blockly's powerful library and Scratch's extensive experience in educational design, resulting in Scratch 3.0's new block-based interface, which launched in January 2019 as an open-source project. The collaboration not only enhanced Blockly with new features driven by Scratch's feedback but also integrated additional tools like Google Translate, broadening Scratch's accessibility and usability in educational coding. This development was complemented by Google's initiatives such as "Code a Snowflake" and a special Google Doodle, both of which introduced millions of children to block programming.