Berkeley University

Berkeley University, through its School of Education, offers BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks), a visual programming environment that extends MIT’s Scratch by adding first-class procedures, lists, and objects, enabling learners to explore computer-science concepts such as recursion, higher-order functions, and object-oriented design without wrestling with syntax. Originally created by Jens Mönig and subsequently refined by UC Berkeley’s Beauty and Joy of Computing team, BYOB is widely adopted in introductory CS courses, after-school clubs, and self-paced online curricula; teachers use it to animate stories, model simulations, and build games, while students drag, drop, and snap together blocks that encapsulate complex logic, gradually progressing from simple loops to custom blocks that accept parameters and return values. The environment exports projects to standalone executables or JavaScript, making it easy to share interactive artifacts across Windows, macOS, or Linux, and its companion cloud library encourages remix culture by letting users publish and fork code instantly. Because BYOB is released under an open-source license, educators freely adapt it to local standards, translate blocks into new languages, and integrate hardware extensions for robotics or data collection. Berkeley University’s software is available for free on get.nero.com, where downloads are delivered through trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always providing the latest version and supporting batch installation alongside other applications.