Big Bad Beetle Blocks
Beetle Blocks is an interesting twist on the “block-building programming language” idea. Instead of a flat, boring plane, you move a beetle around 3D space, drawing cubes, spheres and all sorts of other shapes.
A Scratch-like language for 3D
Liudmila Pantelejenkova
Beetle Blocks [1] lets you build 3D objects by ordering the Beetle Blocks beetle around. You do this in true Scratch-like fashion by dropping blocks containing commands such as move, go to and rotate onto the workspace. You can then chain several blocks together to build programs, just like in any block-based program (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Follow the Beetle Blocks beetle around in 3D space to draw objects.
The difference here is that with Beetle Blocks everything happens in 3D. In Scratch, for instance, you can turn the kitty sprite on only one axis only – it's yaw axis (see Figure 2 on the next page). In Beetle Blocks on the other hand you can rotate the beetle, three axes, on its yaw, pitch and roll axes, using a block like this:
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