This paper presents CoCube a tabletop modular robotics platform designed for robotics education and multirobot algorithm research. CoCube is characterized by its low cost low floors high ceilings and wide walls offering flexibility and broad applicability across various use cases. The platform comprises four key components: CoCube robots which integrate wireless communication movement and interaction; CoModules which provide versatile external functionality; CoMaps which enable high-precision localization via microdot patterns on regular printed paper; and CoTags for interaction. CoCube operates on MicroBlocks a blocks programming language for physical computing inspired by MIT Scratch a widely-used coding language with a simple visual interface that makes programming accessible to young learners. It offers users both flexibility and ease of use with advanced API support for more complex applications. This paper details the design of the CoCube platform and demonstrates its potential in both educational and research contexts.

Snap! is blocks-based programming language that inherits a design and vocabulary from Scratch, but has been extended with support for user-defined functions, and robust built-in libraries. The Snap! Cloud software has been running for over 5 years and recently passed 250,000 users and 2 million projects of which nearly 600,000 are shared publicly. We have been to do an exploratory analysis the database of public projects to better understand how students are programming an using Snap!. This analysis is being conducted using a cleaned up XML-based representation of Snap! projects, which allows querying for data using SQL to extract information from project files. So far, we've seen that projects in Snap! computationally more complex than those found in Scratch, and make use of Snap!'s advanced features. Combined with growing use, we hope to give context to the ways which Snap! (and other) blocks-based languages are being used in classrooms. While there has been a discussion of code smells in Scratch, we haven't seen any discussions using Snap! and hope to show its additional functionality helps write clean code. Finally, we are interested in presenting a clear story of growing use for Snap! that is a compelling case to teachers (and subsequently their students) that blocks-based languages can be quite popular.