Blockly is moving to a new home. Having originated as a single-person project at Google in 2011, it is now a vibrant open source project which has moved into robotics as well as being at the heart of many block-based languages used to introduce new users to coding. Going forward under the stewardship of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, it will remain open source with an Apache 2.0 licence.

From 10 November 2025, the Blockly open source library and assets, and key members of the Blockly team will transition from Google to the Raspberry Pi Foundation. According to Rachel Fenichel, the Team Lead for Blockly, announcing this major change on the Google Open Source blog:

This move is designed to sustain Blockly's long-term stability and continued innovation as a foundational tool for block-based coding and computer science worldwide.

Commenting on this, Philip Colligan, Chief Executive at Raspberry Pi Foundation asserted: 

We are delighted that the Raspberry Pi Foundation will be the new home for Blockly, the world's leading open source library for visual programming. We are committed to maintaining Blockly as an open source project and look forward to working collaboratively with the amazing community of developers and educators to increase its reach and impact in the years to come.

From today's perspective it seems quite amazing that Blockly started out as a side project of a single individual, Neil Fraser, a member of Google's Education Team. Having unveiled Blockly at the Maker Faire in May 2012, he recorded on his blog that he had been "working hard" on a project to create a visual programming language that would be appealing to novice programmer's for the previous year.

It is a tribute to Blockly's appeal that Google backed the project given its history with App Inventor. This visual programming language for Android was started at Google Labs in 2007, led by MIT Professor Hal Abelson, who was on sabbatical as a visiting professor at Google at the time. In 2011 when Google Labs was closed down, App Inventor was handed over to MIT which continued as its development.

While Blockly came on the scene after Scratch, the programming language invented by Mitchel Resnick and his team in the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, which started in 2003, which Blockly is now credited with being a core component in Scratch as it has evolved over time. The fact that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has used Scratch extensively in its educational mission suggests that it will indeed be a good fit for Blockly going forward, especially with financial backing from Google and the fact that key members of the Blockly team are also moving with it.

To know more about Blockly and its origins, see Google Blockly - A Graphical Language with a Difference.

More Information

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Google Blockly - A Graphical Language with a Difference

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