Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale
snap.berkeley.edu
Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale
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Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale
#2Here's Jens Mönig's opening keynote address to Snap!Con20, in which he discusses HyperBlocks, which add APL-like vector and matrix processing to Snap!
His delight in programming is so contagious even with social distancing and teleconferencing!
Snap!Con20 Keynote - Hyperblocks
Opening keynote address of the Snap! Conference 2020, UC Berkeley, about APL-style hyper-operators (working on scalars, vectors, matrices and multi-dimensional data) and the fun to be had applying them to media of all kinds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1qR4vTAw4w&ab_channel=JensM...
Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale
#3That 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's language" that I think of when I think of Snap, and builds at least the ability to take it a lot further. Which, honestly, is just really cool:)
Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale
#4That 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'…
“Snap! is Scheme disguised as Scratch.” -Brian Harvey
Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale
#5Here is another keynote address about Snap! that Jens Mönig was invited to give recently:
Keynote by Jens Mönig "The Music Comes Out Of The Piano. Learning With Computers & From Computers" during ECTELFI20 - the joint online conference of the 15th European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL20) and the 18th Annual Conference of the Educational Technologies SIG of the German Informatics Society.
Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale
#6Jens 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 philosophy that it draws upon and supports, and the associated community drawn together by this philosophy. In a very real sense, the Snap! community embodies the spirit of the early Logo community, extending it for the modern world. The NTLS Educational Technology Leadership Award, awarded to Brian Harvey and Jens Möenig, is presented in recognition of that accomplishment.
Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale
#7The description of Hyperblocks leaves much to be desired. Are they just shape-generic blocks?
Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale
#8Can anyone tell be in one or two sentences how this relates to Scratch? Is is an alternative, is it used by Scratch, is it something different although it looks very similar?
Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale
#9Can anyone tell be in one or two sentences how this relates to Scratch? Is is an alternative, is it used by Scratch, is it something different although it looks very similar?
It's based off Scratch's UI but doesn't share any code. It has a lot more features that delve more into computer science instead of scripting like in Scratch. I believe it was also available in-browser before Scratch was, but I'm not sure.
Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale
#10I 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 about the current iteration of Snap (that I think would be trivial to solve?) is that you have to remember to save your work. I don't think that's a normal thing for people to think about on the web in this day and age, and I have seen many students (and my own children) lose large amounts of work due to this. It's extremely discouraging.
Other than that though, the snap language/environment is quite nice.