Blockly Games for Edutictac

This repository is an Edutictac-maintained fork/deployment of Google Blockly Games, a set of educational games that teach programming with Blockly blocks.

Production site:

• Edutictac deployment: https://blockly.edutictac.es/
• Upstream Blockly Games: https://blockly.games/
• Upstream developer docs: https://github.com/google/blockly-games/wiki

Repository Layout

• appengine/: static site files served in production.
• appengine/*.html: top-level game entry points, for example maze.html.
• appengine/<game>/: generated assets and per-game static files.
• appengine/<game>/index.html: Edutictac static-host redirect for /game/ URLs.
• build/: build and compression scripts.
• json/ and messages.json: translation sources.
• Makefile: build targets for individual games and all games.
• deploy.sh: compiles and uploads appengine/ to the Edutictac server.

Requirements

The Makefile expects these tools to be available:

svn
wget
java
python

The deployment script also requires rsync and SSH access to the Edutictac server.

Build

Build all games:

make games

Build a single game:

make maze
make dance
make music

The generated bundles are written under appengine/<game>/generated/.

Deploy

Deploy everything:

./deploy.sh

Deploy a single game:

./deploy.sh maze

The script compiles the requested target, then uploads appengine/ to:

user@example.org:/srv/www/blockly/

Only Catalan, English, and Spanish generated message files are included during upload:

ca.js
en.js
es.js

Service worker (PWA)

The site registers appengine/sw.js (from common/boot.js) so it can be installed on tablets and played offline. Two rules when deploying:

• Bump the cache version in appengine/sw.js (const CACHE = 'bg-vN';) on every deploy, otherwise returning visitors may keep stale HTML/JS.

• On nginx, serve the worker itself uncached so updates propagate quickly:

  location = /sw.js { add_header Cache-Control "no-cache"; }
  

Only games the user has visited online are available offline (runtime cache).

Static URL Handling

Blockly's original App Engine layout uses top-level entry files such as maze.html, while each game also has an asset directory with the same basename, such as maze/.

On nginx static hosting, /maze/ resolves to the directory. If that directory has no index.html, nginx returns 403 Forbidden. To keep both URL styles working, this fork includes small redirect files:

appengine/dance/index.html
appengine/puzzle/index.html
appengine/maze/index.html
appengine/bird/index.html
appengine/turtle/index.html
appengine/movie/index.html
appengine/music/index.html
appengine/pond-tutor/index.html
appengine/pond-duck/index.html

Each redirect preserves the query string and hash, so:

https://blockly.edutictac.es/maze/?lang=en

loads:

https://blockly.edutictac.es/maze.html?lang=en

Do not remove these files unless nginx is changed to rewrite /game/ URLs to /game.html.

Verification

After deployment, verify the public game URLs:

for game in dance puzzle maze bird turtle movie music pond-tutor pond-duck; do
  curl -sS -o /dev/null -w "$game/ %{http_code}\n" \
    "https://blockly.edutictac.es/$game/?lang=en"
done

Expected result:

dance/ 200
puzzle/ 200
maze/ 200
bird/ 200
turtle/ 200
movie/ 200
music/ 200
pond-tutor/ 200
pond-duck/ 200

Also check the direct .html entry points if a game fails to load:

curl -I "https://blockly.edutictac.es/maze.html?lang=en"

Notes

• Keep changes scoped to this fork unless syncing intentionally from upstream.
• The production deployment is static nginx hosting, not Google App Engine.
• Avoid committing generated or downloaded dependencies unless they are already part of the repository's expected layout.