Bricklayer supports the construction of artifacts in its virtual space consisting of LEGO bricks and Minecraft blocks. However, tools such as LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) and Minecraft only support artifacts consisting of LEGO bricks and Minecraft blocks respectively. Behind the scenes, Bricklayer takes care of the translations (e.g., a Stone block is translate to a GRAY brick) necessary so that its artifacts can be properly viewed in LDD or Minecraft. Specifically, when writing Bricklayer programs one does not need to worry about which pieces an artifact consists of – use whatever pieces you like and view wherever you like.

Conceptual Pieces

Bricklayer provides two conceptual pieces, the EMPTY piece and the IDENTITY piece, to help express certain kinds of computational ideas. These pieces are virtual in nature and do not reside in Bricklayer’s virtual space. However they can be very useful, at the programming-level, for implementing algorithms that create certain kinds of artifacts.

The entire set of LEGO bricks and Minecraft blocks available in Bricklayer can be found at the links below.