This organization is devoted to the Gobstones project, and it is aimed to programmers. If you want to contribute, there are a lot of ways to do it, not only programming. If you want to know more about Gobstones, how to contribute to it, or the related material, refer to the home page. Also, at the end of these document we add a brief explanation of what constitutes Gobstones for the casual reader and completion.

The Github Organization was created to home the repositories implementing to the programming environment of the project, GobstonesWeb. There are repositories with different purposes: some deal with organization issues, and others are related to different versions of the environment. All repositories in the Organization start with a tag, so they can be easily sorted out using that tag. More about repositories in the sections GobstonesWeb2 repositories and Other repositories.

If you want to join the organization or get help on something related to it, please join the Gobstones Community at Discord, and follow the rules of the server to receive a proper role.

The environment currently deployed (in its 3 modes: GobstonesJr, GobstonesSr and GobstonesTeacher) was started on 2015 and developed mostly by a single developer (with some contributions from other programmers), without too much planning in advance regarding architecture, modifiability, or long term growing. The technologies for development weren't chosen with a plan in mind, and soon became obsolete (for example, it uses Polymer for component integration, a preliminary version of Blockly that was not published as a release, and other currently deprecated). For that reason, making any change or improvement is a complex and very error prone task.

The development team decided to start a new version of the environment, GobstonesWeb2, providing first a similar functionality to the current one, but with a more solid architecture, modern technologies, and a workflow guaranteeing modifiability and future growth. While the repositories for the current environment are still present, they will not be further maintained. Eventually they will be properly separated.

Understanding GobstonesWeb2 requires to know a non-trivial amount of information. There are a lot of components to understand, a lot of technologies used that you should be aware of, and, if you want to contribute, also a series of guidelines to understand the workflow and the rules your source code must comply.

To know more about the guidelines to contribute, consult Gobstones-Guidelines.

The architecture of GobstonesWeb2 combines several modules providing different functionalities. For each module, there will be a repository in the organization tagged as [GobstonesWeb2].

We describe the list of repositories of GobstonesWeb2 and their relationship here.

There are 3 repositories related with the organization, tagged as [Organization]:

• .github, the home for the Gobstones organization, containing this README,
• gobstones.github.io, the current website for Gobstones in Github, and
• gobstones-website, the website for Gobstones community.

Other repositories that do not belong to [Organization] or to [GobstonesWeb2] correspond to components related with older versions of the environment (current environment and PyGobstones) or aborted experiments.

Gobstones is a project started at National University of Quilmes in 2008 by Pablo E. --Fidel-- Martínez López and Eduardo Bonelli. The motivation for the project was the seek for am innovative didactics proposal in order to teach programming with very precise goals, to people with no prior experience on programming.

In order to meet that goal, they designed a programming language that capture the main ideas of the proposed didactics, and started to use it in their lectures. Soon it was obvious that a programming environment integrating both the language and the didactics was needed. So, Gobstones involves three elements:

• a didactics proposal,
• a programming language, designed to capture the idea of that didactics, and
• a programming environment, integrating both the didactics and the language.

Those 3 elements grew up along time, usually with rich interrelationships between them The name Gobstones was initially used for the programming language, but as the language was conceived with a particular didactics in mind, the same name was used also for that didactics proposal. The programming environment always was named with a different name (usually containing also the name Gobstones in it), depending on the different implementations and the technologies used for that. The current version used web technologies, and for that reason it is called GobstonesWeb. However, most people use the name Gobstones also to refer to the environment.