The partners are working on an open source version of the language called "Scratch Blocks" based on Blockly, Google's own visual programming code.

With a new initiative called Project Bloks, a team of Google researchers is trying to make coding a hands-on experience---literally.

Google's latest update to the Google Docs code blocks feature brings support for more than a dozen new programming languages.

From here, our tools convert the C-code blocks and processor descriptions to RTL, and then take the RTL through a conventional synthesis-to-GDSII flow.

Playing with blocks helps young children gain language skills, a small study concluded on Monday.