About MotionPals
MotionPals is a block-animation studio for ages 6–8 — the ScratchJr urge to make a character come alive, with no accounts and nothing to buy. You snap blocks in a row to write a little program, press Run, and watch Zip the robot do exactly what you snapped, in the order you snapped it.
There are four kinds of block:
- Move — ◀️ ▶️ 🔼 🔽 walk Zip a step, or 🔄 spin it around.
- Look — 🔍 grow bigger or 🔎 shrink smaller.
- Say — 💬 pop up a word (“hi” · “wow” · “boop” · “hop” · “zoom” · “yay”).
- Repeat all — 🔁 do the whole dance again a few times. This is a loop — the big idea that a program can do a lot with a little.
When you like your dance, MotionPals turns it into a little cartridge code (it starts with MP-). Copy it onto paper or into a message to share with a friend — or paste their code in to load it and remix it. Nothing is ever sent to a server; the code is just your program written down.
- 🤖 Zip — the robot who does exactly what your blocks say, in order.
- 🔧 Cog — the mender who asks what block comes next — and never tells you. Cog asks you a challenge but never tells you the answer — figuring it out is the fun part.
Honest note for grown-ups: MotionPals is a first, playful feel for sequence and repetition — the roots of coding (CSTA 1A-AP). It is a taste, not a claim of any particular outcome. Everything runs on this device; there are no accounts, no ads, and nothing a child does leaves the device.