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Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

snap.berkeley.edu

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Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#41

Post by bharvey »

WalterGR wrote: post #26
DonHopkins wrote: post #6

Jens Mönig and Brian Harvey both received a National Technology Leadership Summit (NTLS) Educational Technology Leadership Award for their impact on educational technology over the course of a lifetime, for their work on Snap! https://ntls.info/ntls-educational-leadership-award/brian-ha... >[...] Snap! is a remarkable technological achievement. However, like Logo, its greatest achievement is arguably the educational…

It’s awesome to see Brian Harvey get recognition. He’s an incredible educator - the finest I’ve encountered - and I’ll be forever grateful that I got to experience that at Berkeley before he retired. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Harvey_(lecturer)

Wow, thanks! My own opinion is far less extreme. :~) But I definitely appreciate hearing yours.

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#42

Post by bharvey »

acbart wrote: post #20
DonHopkins wrote: post #6

Jens Mönig and Brian Harvey both received a National Technology Leadership Summit (NTLS) Educational Technology Leadership Award for their impact on educational technology over the course of a lifetime, for their work on Snap! https://ntls.info/ntls-educational-leadership-award/brian-ha... >[...] Snap! is a remarkable technological achievement. However, like Logo, its greatest achievement is arguably the educational…

Very well deserved, Jens is an awesome person.

I can second that. The code of Snap! itself is virtually all Jens. My main contribution was teaching him about lambda.

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#43

Post by bharvey »

oretoz wrote: post #32

Great. I had read about it but wasn’t sure if it was a better option than Scratch for younger kids. Mine are 6 and 7 and I they use something similar to Scratch. Does anybody know if younger kids use Snap! ?

We have a few who've just shown up on their own, but my friend Paul Goldenberg (my own nominee for best educator) has a project using Snap! with second graders, not to teach programming but to teach mathematics using Snap!-based microworlds.

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#44

Post by skrebbel »

WalterGR wrote: post #27
amelius wrote: post #16

Note: it's not related to the package manager. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(package_manager)

Alternately: Note: it’s related to the visual programming language. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(programming_language) Or with full snark mode enabled: Note: it’s about the visual programming language (2009) and not the package manager (2014.) :)

Surely you must mean,

Note: it’s about the visual programming language (2009) and not about the band (1989) or the package manager (2014.)

:)

(full geek mode enabled: the band name is even spelled identically, including the bang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap! - Given that Jens Mönig, like the band, is German, here's hoping that the name is a tribute)

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#45

Post by hyperbovine »

WalterGR wrote: post #26
DonHopkins wrote: post #6

Jens Mönig and Brian Harvey both received a National Technology Leadership Summit (NTLS) Educational Technology Leadership Award for their impact on educational technology over the course of a lifetime, for their work on Snap! https://ntls.info/ntls-educational-leadership-award/brian-ha... >[...] Snap! is a remarkable technological achievement. However, like Logo, its greatest achievement is arguably the educational…

It’s awesome to see Brian Harvey get recognition. He’s an incredible educator - the finest I’ve encountered - and I’ll be forever grateful that I got to experience that at Berkeley before he retired. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Harvey_(lecturer)

Learning Scheme and SiCP from him in CS61A was my best experience in college. Pity it happened first semester freshmen year ;-)

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#46

Post by dvdkhlng »

agumonkey wrote: post #12
DonHopkins wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Snap! is Scheme disguised as Scratch.” -Brian Harvey

S3 btw do people transition out from snap! ? do they go emacs ? vi ? IDE ?

I'd suggest TIC-80 [1] as an intermediate step from Snap! to larger IDEs. TIC-80 documentation [2] is a little thin, but overall it's a very pragmatic integrated development environment that combines sound, sprite, map and code-editor into one very simple IDE environment (no debugger, though, only rudimentary logging).

You have a choice between multiple script languages (Lua, Javascript and more). The run-time library [3] only has a handful of simple functions but is feature-complete nonetheless (plus there is some address-based peek/poke API to do more advanced, low-level stuff).

I'd imagine learning javascript programming by starting game-development in TIC-80 to be much more straight-forward than attempting to wrestle with the complexities of HTML5+CSS+javascript+tooling for in-browser programming.

[1] https://tic80.com/

[2] https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/wiki

[3] https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/wiki#special-functions

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#47

Post by bharvey »

skrebbel wrote: post #44
WalterGR wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternately: Note: it’s related to the visual programming language. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(programming_language) Or with full snark mode enabled: Note: it’s about the visual programming language (2009) and not the package manager (2014.) :)

Surely you must mean, Note: it’s about the visual programming language (2009) and not about the band (1989) or the package manager (2014.) :) (full geek mode enabled: the band name is even spelled identically, including the bang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap ! - Given that Jens Mönig, like the band, is German, here's hoping that the name is a tribute)

I'm afraid the exclamation point was my doing, not Jens's. I was scared of how many other things were called "snap," including the US welfare program that used to be food stamps, and was hoping to stand out from them. Didn't work; I didn't realize that search engines pretty much ignore punctuation.

We were very happy with the name BYOB, but we had a few teachers tell us very insistently that they could never use a language called that with kids. Those of you who live in civilized countries can't appreciate Americans' lack of a sense of humor. So we were looking for a reasonably short name for which the ___.berkeley.edu domain was available, and Snap was what we found.

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#48

Post by DonHopkins »

skrebbel wrote: post #44
WalterGR wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternately: Note: it’s related to the visual programming language. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(programming_language) Or with full snark mode enabled: Note: it’s about the visual programming language (2009) and not the package manager (2014.) :)

Surely you must mean, Note: it’s about the visual programming language (2009) and not about the band (1989) or the package manager (2014.) :) (full geek mode enabled: the band name is even spelled identically, including the bang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap ! - Given that Jens Mönig, like the band, is German, here's hoping that the name is a tribute)

There's actually a Snap! disambiguation page on Wikipedia, that includes the Snap! German Eurodance group, as well as the Snap! (album), greatest hits album of The Jam, the Snap! programming language, and SNAP!, a Canadian English-language arts magazine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(disambiguation)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap%21

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(album)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(programming_language)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP%21

I think the Object Oriented version of Snap! should be called "Snap! Snap!" instead of "Snap!++".

Great minds snap alike! (That man's nuts: grab 'em! Woo hoo!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8xmQDpYGYo&t=1m38s

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#49

Post by dvdkhlng »

xiaomai wrote: post #10

I taught a high-school Intro to CS course last year with the TEALs program ( https://tealsk12.org ). I was very unenthusiastic when I heard that the first semester was taught using Snap, but I was wrong. Snap is a pretty awesome way to introduce someone to programming (much more powerful and reliable than other block-based programming environments I've tinkered with like the Kano kit). The one really terrible thing a…

I can second that, I have seen people frustrated after loosing work in Snap! by missing to save. But then that's maybe also a lesson people ought to learn early-on when creating stuff on the computer: safe early and create backups :)
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