Presented by:

Dan Garcia

from UC Berkeley

Dan Garcia is a Teaching Professor in the EECS department at UC Berkeley. He was selected as an ACM Distinguished Educator in 2012 and ACM Distinguished Speaker in 2019, and is a national leader in the "CSforALL" movement, bringing engaging computer science to students normally underrepresented in the field.

Thanks to four National Science Foundation grants, the "Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC)" non-majors course he co-developed has been shared with over 800 high school teachers. He is delighted to regularly have more than 50% female enrollment in BJC, with a high mark of 65% in the Spring of 2018, shattering the campus record for an intro computing course, and is among the highest in the nation! He is humbled by the international exposure he and the course have received in the New York Times, PBS, NPR, and others media outlets. He is working on the BJC Middle School curriculum.

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Gurkaran Singh Goindi

from UC Berkeley

Having spent a year and a half teaching BJC and Snap! to middle school first-time-programmers, I was able to witness some errors that I'd not seen before. Students learning keep, for example, and still fuzzy about domain and range, were dragging the predicate into the wrong slot for keep. It dropped happily, but it made me wonder why it did -- keep ONLY works over lists, so why would Snap! allow it to be dropped? Commands can't be dropped into input slots, so wouldn't Snap! be more user-friendly if it didn't even allow a drop for a block that would NEVER make semantic sense? This short talk is a proposal (and followup discussion) for Snap!'s behavior when this mode is turned on.


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Duration:
30 min
Room:
Zoom 3
Conference:
Snap!Con 2020
Type:
Short Talk
Track:
Short Talk
Difficulty:
N/A