Program for Snap!Con 2021

Susan Klimczak, Cynthia Solomon, Sarah Magner

In this workshop, we will focus on building blocks that allow you to play with polygons and spirals with TurtleStitch. If you create a design you love and do not have access to a computerized embroidery machine, global TurtleStitch community friends will embroider & mail you your design!

TurtleStitch is an activity and a coding environment. TurtleStitching is a mix of art, desi...
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Jens Mönig, Jadga Hügle

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...
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Matthias Kim

Codification means to create Python code directly out of Snap! code via a mapping Snap! blocks to Python code. The created Python code via codification in Snap! is downloaded and runs immediately in Python. This has been useful in supporting the steps from Snap! development in a blocks language to a typing language.

I will demonstrate how we enhanced codification with GUI elements. T...
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Akos Ledeczi, Devin Jean

Many schools offer makerspaces and other opportunities for students to get their hands on simple embedded computers, sensors, and educational robots. However, most do not. The kind of sensors and devices available are limited by cost, and these kinds of activities are restricted to schools where the lab is located, making remote education difficult. But mobile devices that most students alre...
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Join us in Ohyay!

Take a break! Step away and stretch. If you're feeling up for it, join others in the virtual hallway for some socialization.

Jens Mönig, Jadga Hügle

After more than a year of pandemic-induced isolation, now is the time for "wide-walls". We have begun to open up Snap! to other forms of collaboration and to a wider variety of project domains. This in itself is an ongoing common effort in which many from around the world participate with their ideas, designs and contributions. A new major Snap! release planned for later this year revolves a...
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Take a break and step away from screens.

Jeremy Millard, Ken Kahn, Nathalie Carrié, Akos Ledeczi, Richard Millwood, Gordon Stein, Glen Bull, Marnie Hill, Andreas Gräfl

The first of two lightning (five-minute) talk sessions.

Lightning talks are listed in the order they are scheduled, but do no count on each talk starting exactly as scheduled. Each speaker will have 5 minutes, with the remaining time at the end to be used for Q&A.

1. Three new blocks. A w...
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Akos Ledeczi

In this lightning talk, we’ll show how three new blocks: call, send msg and when I receive msg open up students’ programs to the internet and enable a wide array of possibilities for engaging projects. NetsBlox, a Snap! extension, was designed to teach advanced concepts to novice programmers. Distributed programming, computer networking, cyb...
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Andreas Gräfl

In the past semesters, we have conducted several courses on the topic of microcontrollers with students as well as pupils. On the one hand, we would like to share our experiences that we have gained in teaching under the given conditions. On the other hand, we would also like to present you selected works of the students and pupils, which were created under the topic of "microBlocks meets ph...
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Rich Nguyen, Jo Watts, Glen Bull

Creation of art offers an engaging way to introduce coding to novices. Participants in this workshop will have the opportunity to explore creation of art in different styles, including the sculptors Alexander Calder and Bathsheba Grossman, the nineteenth century post-impressionist artist, Georges Seurat, the twentieth century artists Mark Rothco and Jackson Pollock, and the contemporary illu...
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Jeremy Millard

What are the unique benefits and challenges of running a hackathon in Minecraft? This talk will share observations from game jam hackathon events on the DiamondFire multiplayer server. In these game jam events, teams are given a theme and a limited amount of time to design and program a game on top of Minecraft. I’ll discuss how the Minecraft platform and multiplayer setting engages students...
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Marnie Hill

CS Frontiers is a new course that is being developed for students who have successfully completed the AP Computer Science Principles course. This course is an alternative to AP Computer Science A, which focuses on Java programming. CS Frontiers is a project-based curriculum that teaches about distributed computing, computer networking, cybersecurity, the internet of things, and machine learn...
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Richard Millwood

Embroidery and computing have a long history, exemplified by the work of Vera Molnar. Her early work in 1946 developed embroidery algorithmicly without any recourse to computers. Subsequently she programmed designs when she had access to computing power in the 1960s. One particular design is explored in this lightning talk, in which Molnar at created an array of 4x4 arrays of pin, and then ...
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Ken Kahn

Note that the day after this talk the project was significantly improved and made clearer. And note that it requires the dev version of Snap!

A demo and discussion of this project that can turn any text ...
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Gordon Stein

Distance education has recently become more of a priority. As students return to classrooms, a “hybrid” model will be used by some, requiring collaboration between students attending physically and virtually. This talk will showcase an in-development platform using a Snap!-based programming interface combined with a networked robotics simulation to allow students to participate in collaborat...
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Nathalie Carrié

Slides

This talk concerns a branch of mathematics, linear algebra. I have started a Snap! project of matrix calculus and by chance, while testing my blocks, I came across a result of linear algebra apparently unknown today, result that can simply be...
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Take a break! Step away and stretch. If you're feeling up for it, join others in the virtual hallway for some socialization.

José García

José García, Nina Coll & Victor Casado

Citilab Cornellà in collaboration with of Mathematics Museum of Catalonia (MMACA) have created several materials, addressed to primary schools to learn mathematics and programming language simultaneously.

Our aim is to awake student’s curiosity for these two subjects, by proposing funny challenges with Learning Corners methodology. I...
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Jeremy Millard

Want to learn coding concepts by creating multiplayer games in Minecraft? On the DiamondFire server, students can create their own games directly within Minecraft using a drag-and-drop style coding language. Students can collaborate and build games in real time, and they can also play each other's games together.

In this demo, we'll create a game on DiamondFire together and take a cl...
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Susan Ettenheim, Audrey Coats, Tsee Lee, Ellen Falk, Shoufen Jacobson

We asked a group of teachers from around the country to share: (1) What students are doing creatively in high school with Snap!, (2) What students are struggling with in high school in learning Snap!, (3) How teachers can support the learners who need more time to process coding in Snap! or need more foundational structure?, (4) How can teachers keep more advanced students engaged?

W...
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Brian Broll, Mark Schoenfield, Corey Brady, Clifford Anderson

This paper presents a case study of an ongoing experiment at Vanderbilt University to teach the fundamental concepts of text mining to undergraduates in an accessible and equitable way. During the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters, the authors instructed two cohorts of students from a variety of backgrounds, ranging from computer science to English, in a range of text mining techniques. Af...
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Yuan Garcia

Snap is an amazing piece of work, but like every masterpiece, it can always be improved. Here’s what Snap! can learn from the popular video game Minecraft.

Social: The reason that I spent the last 5 years playing Minecraft was because my friends were playing along with me. I would have quit ages ago if it weren’t for that social element. It wasn’t just synchronously...
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Nathalie Carrié

Vee is a simple recursive algorithm that explains how plants magically grow.
Vee sounds like the french world Vie that means Life. This is exactly what it is about.
Fractal objects will be defined and described with two simple examples: the Von Koch fractal and the Sierpinski triangle.
We will illustrate how recursiveness combined with randomness can explain the real...
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Vasiliy Birulin, Sergei Zhuchkov

We teach kids coding in Snap! and Python, while playing in Minecraft at the same time. Our online learning environment is pre-integrated with Minecraft, hence we offer smooth and easy installation to start both learning and teaching in a matter of minutes.

We provide both self-learning online courses for students as well as one-to-one teacher led curriculum. The platform provides com...
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Take a break! Step away and stretch. If you're feeling up for it, join others in the virtual hallway for some socialization.

Michael Ball

Come, meet your other Snap!Con 2021 attendees in a casual, "Speed Dating"-style gathering using the Ohyay platform. We'll drop small random groups of attendees in a room for a few minutes, encouraging everyone to introduce themselves and meet each other. Here are some starter questions:

• What's your name?
• Where are you from?
• How much Snap! programmin...
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Beat Horat, Mareen Grillenberger

In this workshop, the participants will be introduced to a learning scenario for creative programming in TurtleStitch and explore both the tools and materials that were used and created by students during workshops we conducted in a school during project days at lower secondary level. Using TurtleStitch code to create embroidery, we intend to promote learning in a creative setting that match...
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June Mark, Paul Goldenberg, Zak Kolar, Deborah Spencer, Kate Coleman, Kristen Reed

The Math+C project at Education Development Center (EDC) is developing a coherent integration of CS ideas and skills into elementary mathematics. Our broad hypothesis is that programming, suitably designed, can be an optimal language for children to express and explore mathematical ideas, changing how children learn mathematics and helping develop and reveal children's computational thinking...
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Nicole Marmé, Jens-Peter Knemeyer, Alexandra Abramova, Jan Ebel , Wiebke Thumfart

Online teaching has become even more popular since Covid-19. Teaching a beginner workshop in Snap! can also be done completely online.

With our online Moodle course, "Art & Coding," beginners learn to program with Snap! using learning videos and interactive H5P content. In this workshop, we'll provide some insight into the Moodle course and its structure. And, y...
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Clifford Anderson, Brian Broll

Open ended programming environments provide a wonderful low threshold, high ceiling, and wide walls. However, many lack autograding capabilities. This is a missed opportunity as autograding could make them more conducive to usage in MOOCs such as Coursera as well as make curriculum easier to adopt. Furthermore, if users were able to easily create and distribute their own autograders, this co...
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Join us in ohyay!

Take a break! Step away and stretch. If you're feeling up for it, join others in the virtual hallway for some socialization.

Karina Edmonds, Dan Garcia

Take a look at any kid’s laptop, notebook, school locker, or bedroom and you will see it full of stickers, drawings, and posters that allow them to express their creativity and identity. By contrast, most technology education (curricula and tools) are one-size-fits-all. Educators and developers should instead allow for deep customization, at many levels, to give students ownership of their e...
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Take a break and step away from screens.

Ken Kahn, Luis Mayorga, Samo Koprivec , Yoshiki Ohshima, Daniel Jackson, Alexandra Abramova, Russell Morland

The second of two lightning (five-minute) talk sessions.

Lightning talks are listed in the order they are scheduled, but do no count on each talk starting exactly as scheduled. Each speaker will have 5 minutes, with the remaining time at the end to be used for Q&A.

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Russell Morland

Last year, snap got a ray-length block. Using that, we could make a 3D image, and even with curved walls. However, that system had the problem that it was still only a 2D environment, without the ceiling and floor heights of DOOM. Based on that, I decided to create a program which does a similar thing, but in two dimensions. It choosing a colour for each pixel depending on the distance to th...
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Ken Kahn

Teachable Machine has a very simple interface for creating machine learning models that can provide labels for images, sounds, and poses. I'll demonstrate a new Snap! block that imports these models for use in your own projects.

Using this block, you can create projects that classify images, respond to different so...
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Yoshiki Ohshima

What do you do when you want to create a Snap! project with your friend? This talk will demonstrate a system where you and your friends can build a stack of blocks and paint a costume together in real time.

A small modification is made to Snap! so that it supports multiple "hands", and the screen is streamed to participants over WebRTC. The events from remote users are transmitted to...
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Daniel Jackson

We will show how Snap! may be used to connect mathematics learning goals ranging from elementary school to the advanced undergraduate level. In particular, we will demonstrate how EDC's micro-unit "Number Line" may be used to teach topics ranging from elementary numeracy to advanced mathematics topics such as finite Abelian group theory. We will also describe experiences that some Elementary...
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Luis Mayorga

One of my functions in Fab Lab Yucatán, is the design and application of learning courses for people without technical knowledge on physical computing or digital fabrication, I use a lot block-coding, and in this talk I want to share some of the insights we have gotten on the way and in our specific mexican context.

Alexandra Abramova

The Smart City self-study course is made up of several individual modules and covers various basic programming concepts. The course consists of numerous programming examples, learning videos, and H5P exercise content. In addition, small tests are used after each chapter to test knowledge. Subsequently, a complete simulation of a city powered by renewable energy is created. In the 2020-2021 s...
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Samo Koprivec

My 4.04 min (hopefully that's not a sign there will be error 404 :-) ) Talk's timeline is like an egg. :-)

Its intro is an "eggshell" you have to break through to get to the "egg white" (both travel-oriented & history-oriented), the demo of the (eccentric) Text Editor is "yolk", after which more "egg white" (comedy-oriented demo of the historically first WYSIWYG text editor from...
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Bhavin Faldu

Learning is a multifaceted, multidimensional and dynamic experience made of intricate layers that include reading, writing, listening, watching, thinking, testing and more. These layers weave together to make Artificial Intelligence learning an experience that is personal and relative to every person or student with a block based programming environment. That knowledge, when partnered with a...
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Take a break! Step away and stretch. If you're feeling up for it, join others in the virtual hallway for some socialization.

Wolfgang Slany

Catrobat considers itself the little sister project of Scratch for smartphones. Over the last decade, the Catrobat FOSS team has turned towards Snap!, TurtleStitch, NetsBlox, and ecraft2learn's AI extension for inspiration and new ideas to bring to Android and iOS. In my presentation I will show what in particular inspired us from Snap!, what we cannot yet do but are working on, as well as a...
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Dan Garcia, Mary Fries, Deanna Gelosi, Pamela Fox, Lauren, Michael Ball

We have provided updates on the alpha- and beta-development of the BJC Middle School curriculum the last two Snap!Cons, and have heard immeasurably valuable feedback. We went back to the drawing board, created a set of Design Principles (modeled off the BJC High School version), involved more curriculum authors, added some developers, and correlated with CSTA CS 6-8th grade and 9-10th grade ...
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Bernat Romagosa

Inspired by Logo, Smalltalk is a programming language and environment originally designed for children at Xerox PARC in the 1970s with the clear vision that computers should be graphical and fully programmable. It became the birthplace of so many ideas that we identify as universal computer concepts nowadays, such as desktops, object orientation, overlapping windows, dropdown menus or icons....
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Xavier Pi

SDL4Snap! is a Snap! library that lets us translate directly SDL models to Snap!.

SDL is a standardized graphical language, widely used for formal and non-ambiguous models, that provides a solid foundation for specifying agent-based simulation software. It is easy to understand and it can be used by people coming from ...
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Stefano Federici

Storytelling is one of the main topics (stories, games, and animations) that block languages have been developed for. But the biggest part of stories developed by users of block languages are PMVs (Picture Music Video), AMVs (Animation Music Video), or MAPs (Multi-Animator Project). In those projects the animation is not realized by using blocks devoted to Movements or by applying changes t...
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Isabella Gransbury

Historically, females have shown a declining interest in the field of computer science. Previous computer science curricula has failed to address the lack of female centered computer science activities, such as socially relevant and real-life events. Therefore, the Computer Science Frontiers project introduces teachers to the topics of artificial intelligence and distributed computing so tha...
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Take a break! Step away and stretch. If you're feeling up for it, join others in the virtual hallway for some socialization.

Jens-Peter Knemeyer

You have been trapped in the SnapCon! lobby by a hacker attack. The electronically locked exit can only be opened with a password (or rather sentence). Hints on the solution are distributed throughout the building. But you only have 40 minutes to leave the hall, otherwise….

Richard Millwood

This workshop will give participants a TurtleStitch experience - developing a program to make an embroidery. Participants will be introduced to TurtleStitch and given some knowledge of the considerations needed when programming for output on an embroidery machine. Then, the idea will be to start from artworks provided by the workshop...
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Rich Nguyen, Jo Watts, Glen Bull

Creation of art offers an engaging way to introduce coding to novices. Participants in this workshop will have the opportunity to explore creation of art in different styles, including the sculptors Alexander Calder and Bathsheba Grossman, the nineteenth century post-impressionist artist, Georges Seurat, the twentieth century artists Mark Rothco and Jackson Pollock, and the contemporary illu...
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Eckart Modrow

SciSnap! is a tool for working on a level between pure programming language and finished applications. It contains libraries for mathematical and data related problems as well as SQL queries. In addition, sprites and the stage can be configured as sketchpads for the creation of diagrams, image processing, graphs, and neural networks. In the workshop, the use of SciSnap! will be demonstrated ...
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Tabitha Lee, Brian Broll

Smart devices and voice assistants have become ubiquitous in the era of the internet of things. This presents a huge opportunity for making computing more relevant and engaging - especially for young learners! What if students could use familiar, blocks-based programming environments to create their own voice assistants?

To this end, we have recently made it possible to develop Amazo...
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Join us in ohyay!

Take a break! Step away and stretch. If you're feeling up for it, join others in the virtual hallway for some socialization.

Andrea Mayr-Stalder

Over the last few years, the TS community has grown not only in size but also in diversity, integrating people from different cultures, ages and genders. We believe this has to do with the specific attraction that textiles generate. Every culture has a specific textile tradition which reaches directly into the daily lives of everyone, evocating both personal as well as collective memories, g...
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Take a break and step away from screens.

Tom Lauwers

Remote robots are robotics projects that can be accessed and programmed via the internet by anyone from anywhere. These robots use the NetsBlox platform, a multiplayer networking blocks programming environment that is derived from Snap! Remote Robots offer a way to inject physical computing and IoT concepts into the online/virtual space; it provides an experience that is more compelling than...
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Mary Fries, Audrey Coats, Kim Overman, Susan Ettenheim

We all know Snap! is a powerful programming language and learning tool, but what more could be done to support new users in acclimating to the environment quickly so they can focus on learning programming? Join a panel of experienced Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) teachers in a constructive discussion about the top Snap! needs for improving the first few weeks of school....
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Bambi Brewer, Tom Lauwers

The online nature of Snap! is a great advantage because it works across multiple platforms without requiring users to install anything. However, in the past, integrating physical computing with Snap! has required the user to install software to translate the Snap! commands into Bluetooth or serial commands to the hardware. With the advent of progressive web apps, communication with the hardw...
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Katharina Missling

What do you think about, when you think of AI? I am sure that Wall-E, R2D2 and maybe Ava from the movie Ex Machina are among the thoughts that go through your head. Our associations with AI often go directly to imagining human-like robots. It is difficult for us to imagine that something can be intelligent without being or looking human. It is similar for learners. The easier we make it for ...
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Take a break! Step away and stretch. If you're feeling up for it, join others in the virtual hallway for some socialization.

John Maloney

Microcontrollers excel at sensing and controlling the physical world. Snap! excels at graphics, animation, and user interaction. Thanks to contributions from the community and the new Web Serial feature of Chrome and Edge browsers, Snap! users can now have the best of both worlds.

Games that respond to physical gestures, home automation, Snap! controlled animatronic characters, proje...
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Markus Gaelli

Snap! has open ceilings and could be used to teach any concept. Test driven development, and especially behavior-driven development is an important concept of modern day software-engineering like eXtreme Programming.

Accepting "The Ray Tracer Challenge / "A Test-Driven Guide to your first 3D Rende...
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Irene Ortega, Lam Pham, Bojin Yao, Dan Garcia

Anyone can write a tried-and-true exam question that says “write a block according to the following specifications”, or “predict what does the following code do?”. We have collectively been authoring Snap! assessments (well, it was BYOB back in the day) for over 16 years, and would like to share some much more creative ways we’ve come up with to assess Snap! programming. The topics we will i...
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Anthony Gordon

The NSF funded ExCITE project is adding robotics and computer control activities to the popular Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) AP-CSP curriculum. BJC uses the Snap! language. ExCITE has commissioned Steve Holmes (the developer of the BirdBrain Technologies Hummingbird proprietary micro:bit connector software interface and block library) to develop a micro:bit – Snap! connector software a...
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Simon Mong

In this talk, I will share my own story about how I found the importance of being playful and playing games, in teaching coding and specifically, Turtlestitch. Students learn about making a square and then a polygon fairly easily, but making the important transition to coding more complex and more beautiful designs, the ones we all admire in life and find fascinating, is our real challenge.<...
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Brian Harvey

Do you think of brown as a color in its own right, or as just a kind of orange? How do you use colors in projects? The red-green-blue color system familiar to programmers is just the right thing for manufacturers of computer monitors, but isn't so helpful for developing intuitions about color perception. (Okay, mix blue and green, and it's not a surprise that you get cyan, which is sort o...
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Margaret Low, Max Musau, Susan Ettenheim

TurtleStitch is freely available software that enables the generation and stitching of patterns using a digital embroidery machine, effectively giving programmatic control of the machine. TurtleStitch enables the creation of physical objects through the use of software and hardware, and bridges the world of programming and textiles enabling the creation of stitched patterns on materials, in...
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Take a break! Step away and stretch. If you're feeling up for it, join others in the virtual hallway for some socialization.

Bernat Romagosa

The Virtual University of the Cyberspace has very generously offered to host this experimental social event for us, where we should all be able to socialize from within Snap! itself, unless the Demo Gods are awake and looking at us at that time!

If you're not afraid of things breaking and failing, join us in this interactive Snap! demo and explore the campus facilit...
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Bernat Romagosa, Simon Walters

Add your project to the list

If you'd definitely like a chance to present your project, please make a post in the forum. We'll also be taking sign ups during the session, if there is time.

What are you actually doing with Snap!? This is a time to share your recent...
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Join the Hallway track to socialize with other Snap!Con attendees.

We will be using the platform ohyay for our hallway track.

Take a break! Step away and stretch. If you're feeling up for it, join others in the virtual hallway for some socialization.

Akos Ledeczi, Brian Broll

NetsBlox is an extension of Snap! that introduces two new concepts for developing distributed applications: RPCs and message passing. These two concepts open up a plethora of possibilities accessible to beginners. RPCs can be used to access existing web services like Google Maps, Twitter, ThingSpeak, and The MovieDB or real-world datasets including climate, eclipse, and COVID data. Message p...
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Take a break and step away from screens.

Dan Garcia

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...
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Richard Millwood

Turtlestitch is a Snap!-derived environment for creating artwork for embroidering on a machine. It has been a powerful motivator to all kinds of people to engage in programming. Founded by keynote speaker Andrea Mayr Stalder, it has been an exciting innovation to link Turtle geometry to the capabilities of embroidery machines and bri...
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Yuan Garcia, Brian Harvey

Significance and Relevance of the Topic: This is a continuation of the discussion at this talk about whether the user experience would be improved by game-like social features. We expect some controversy. :~)

Expected Audience: Game players, Snap! developers, people with opinions about social media.

Discussion Leader(s): @bh and @silverdragon1353 whose talk started the conver...
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Audrey Coats

Teaching CS in a high school can be a lonely job. Many of us are the only ones in the building, if not the district. Come make some new contacts, colleagues, friends that share your passion for computer science education at the high school (or even middle school) level. Bring your best practices or challenges that you can share.

Topic ideas: Teaching specific: Helping students tha...
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John Maloney

Submitted on behalf of John:

This BoF is for those interested in connecting Snap! to the physical world using robots, microcontrollers, sensors, servos, and other devices. There have been a number of physical computing presentations at SnapCon! 2021 and it would be great to have a chance to chat with others doing similar work.

We might compare and contrast the various approac...
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Take a break! Step away and stretch. If you're feeling up for it, join others in the virtual hallway for some socialization.

Jens Mönig, Brian Harvey, Bernat Romagosa, Jadga Hügle, Michael Ball

The Snap! team will share their perspectives on what we think is a possibility for the future.

We make no promises about what we'll build about when or how we'll build features, but we'll share the why behind decision making. And of course we'll have plenty of time for Q&A!

If you're feeling up for it, join others in the virtual hallway for some socialization. We'll leave ohyay open after the conference ends, meet some friends and keep up with your olds!