Microsoft Programming Experience Toolkit–Blocks to Javascript coding experience

  • Article

The Microsoft Programming Experience Toolkit (PXT) is a framework for creating special-purpose programming experiences for beginners, especially focused on computer science education. PXT’s underlying programming language is a subset of TypeScript (leaving out JavaScript dynamic features).

The main features of PXT are:

Google Blockly-based code editor along with converter to JavaScript
Cloud9 ACE-based text editor with enhanced, robust auto-completion and auto-correction powered by TypeScript.
Extensibility support to define new blocks in TypeScript or C++
Markdown-based documentation system with built-in macros to render block snippets
ARM Thumb machine code emitter
Command-line package manager

The Programming Experience Toolkit (PXT) is currently developed at Microsoft Research interested in more details Read the docs

Programming Experience Toolkit for BBC micro:bit

The BBC micro:bit is a small wearable and programmable mbed-based device that visibly features a 5x5 LED display, accelerometer, compass, buttons, I/O pins, Micro USB plug, Bluetooth Low Energy antenna, ARM Cortex-M0 processor, and battery plug.

Try the PXT editor for BBC micro:bit!

Microsoft and Open Source

Programming Experience Toolkit is open source on github. So if your interest in helping support the project you can simply Fork our repo!

Blocks to JavaScript coding experience

The Microsoft Programming Experience Toolkit (PXT) provides a programming experience based around JavaScript (technically, a subset of TypeScript). The experience has a built-in progression from simple block-based editor, through in-browser text editor with robust auto-completion and auto-fixing, all the way to a professional integrated development environemnt (Visual Studio Code).

PXT for BBC micro:bit

The BBC micro:bit is a small wearable and programmable mbed-based device that visibly features a 5x5 LED display, accelerometer, compass, buttons, I/O pins, Micro USB plug, Bluetooth Low Energy antenna, ARM Cortex-M0 processor, and battery plug. PXT will let you program it! PXT is compatible with the BBC micro:bit.

JavaScript Editor

Upgrade to JavaScript thanks to our rich text editor with contextual help, background checks and auto-completion.