Presented by:

Jadga works on Snap! and loves to create fun projects that might also be helpful for students and teachers. Her favourite Snap! block is map <3

Jens Mönig

from SAP

Jens Mönig is a researcher at SAP and makes interactive programming environments. He is fanatical about visual coding blocks. Jens is the architect and lead programmer of UC Berkeley’s "Snap! Build Your Own Blocks" programming language, used in the introductory “Beauty and Joy of Computing” curriculum. Previously Jens has worked under Alan Kay on the GP programming language together with John Maloney and Yoshiki Ohshima, helped develop Scratch for the MIT Media Lab and written enterprise software at MioSoft. Jens is a fully qualified lawyer in Germany and has been an attorney, corporate counsel and lecturer for many years before rediscovering his love for programming through Scratch and Squeak. For leisure Jens likes guitar picking and strumming his mandolin.

Volunteer Hosts
Thanks for helping with Snap!Con 2021!

Dan Garcia

from UC Berkeley
No materials for the event yet, sorry!

In this workshop, we'll share a curriculum around AI that we're currently working on. We try to show how to use machine learning in the classroom by implementing a gesture recognizer (based on the $1 gesture recognizer) in Snap!.

We start by creating a single-stroke gesture drawing program. By building an "animate" control structure based on the pen trails, we are able to animate our drawn gestures. To recognize the drawn gestures, we extend the drawing program to record paths. We then discuss why it's difficult to just compare two paths to recognize a gesture, and introduce the "resample" block that normalizes all paths to a specific number of points. The actual recognition happens in a nearest neighbour block that will find the smallest difference between the current resampled path and the paths stored in an examples list. Finally, we can use this identified gesture for storytelling by broadcasting the name of the gesture and animating it accordingly.

We will also share our pedagogical approaches, lesson plans, and discussion ideas as well as further AI education resources in this workshop.

Duration:
1 h
Room:
Room 2
Conference:
Snap!Con 2021
Type:
Workshop