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.

No materials for the event yet, sorry!

Let's gather Middle School teachers (of students ages 11-13) together, curriculum providers, parents, tool builders, etc. to learn from each other and share resources! We gathered last year at SnapCon 2020 online, and enjoyed meeting each other. There are some exciting Snap! updates and features that would be useful for early learners of Snap!, we could also gather others during the BOF discussion:

  • A single rainbow palette that collapses all the blocks (both custom and built-in) into one large, scrollable window
  • A "microworld" approach to a starter project, in which only the blocks that are needed are shown. This feature was discussed at SnapCon 2019, and was always available to those who wanted to fork Snap! and remove the blocks for a particular use case. However, for those who didn't want to edit the Snap! source, the same effect can be achieved by hiding blocks (manually).

If you're at all involved in the Middle School space, join us!

Duration:
30 min
Room:
Room 1
Conference:
Snap!Con 2021
Type:
Birds of a Feather