51–59 of 59 posts
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.
That is some seriously impressive improvement on performance and memory use; I'd be interested to know what exactly they did to do that (ex. did they realize they could rearrange something to do the same thing with less work, or is this just a lot of little optimizations adding up?). Also cool, if a little weird to me, to see full-blown map-reduce and APL-like features; I feel like that moves away from the "beginner'…
The memory-footprint and performance improvements basically boil down to a departure from pre-rendering and caching all the graphics to redrawing them just in time. We were delighted to find out that rerendering complex graphical shapes in modern browsers can be done faster and with less memory penalty than pre-rendering and caching. Here's part of a presentation I drew up earlier this year with a few slides outlinin…
> Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 la…
That said, I feel a bit dumb right now, but can you (or anyone, really) elaborate what's funny and/or sensitive about the name BYOB? I really can't figure it out. It seems like just an abbreviation to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ;-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Learning Scheme and SiCP from him in CS61A was my best experience in college. Pity it happened first semester freshmen year ;-)
Kind of unfortunate CS61A is now Python.
OTOH, for most 61a students, this course (indeed the entire major) amounts to a very expensive form of vocational training. Developing an aesthetic appreciation for finely crafted code seems somewhat orthogonal to their end goal, which in 99% of cases is getting a high-paying job writing Python, C++, or some other A-list language. I can't really see the benefit of a formative semester spent on honing their Lisp chops. As educators, we want to believe that the latter leads to the former, but I'm a bit skeptical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 la…
I feel your pain, I once made a PHP template engine called Farty and needless to say, it didn't take off :-) That said, I feel a bit dumb right now, but can you (or anyone, really) elaborate what's funny and/or sensitive about the name BYOB? I really can't figure it out. It seems like just an abbreviation to me.
Bring your own beer, and since alcohol is Evil™ anywhere even remotely associated with children...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The memory-footprint and performance improvements basically boil down to a departure from pre-rendering and caching all the graphics to redrawing them just in time. We were delighted to find out that rerendering complex graphical shapes in modern browsers can be done faster and with less memory penalty than pre-rendering and caching. Here's part of a presentation I drew up earlier this year with a few slides outlinin…
Regarding the link: > Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be really helpful if Scratch would allow projects with multiple scenes. For any moderately involved story or game, there will tend to be multiple scenes or levels. The limitations of a single scene makes it necessary to write many conditional statements to show and hide items or change backdrops when a scene or level changes.
Interesting that you should mention the idea of scenes, just as we've begun working on them in Snap!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.