Program for Snap!Con 2022

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2022-08-04

08:00 AM PDT

Tom Lauwers

AI is an intelligence multiplier, in the same way that industrial machines are muscle multipliers. As our AI gets better, it will allow people to do more, faster, and better, in just about every field of work. Though the development of new AI methods remains the province of highly trained researchers, all of us are already interacting with AI daily, and so it’s important for everyone, and es...
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Room 1
Workshop

Kathy Giori

Physical Computing Workshop Agenda:

  • Super quick introduction to physical computing, and the MicroBlocks IDE
  • Watch this! Several brief demonstrations highlighting the "liveness" of MicroBlocks and how powerful it is to explore the physical world (very much like Snap! except perfect for exploring the physical w...
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Room 2
Workshop
UC Berkeley

Jo Watts, Glen Bull

Glen Bull, Jo Watts, and Rachel Gibson - University of Virginia Online Workshop

Creation of music offers an engaging way to introduce coding to novices. Participants in this workshop will have an opportunity to explore creation of music using blocks developed in TuneScope (www.tunescope.org), an extension of Snap! (Note: it is pos...
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Room 3
Workshop

cynthia.solomon@gmail.com, Susan Klimczak, Beth Lloyd

In this workshop, we will make designs in TurtleStitch for a computerized embroidery machine. After you create a design that you love and do not have access to a machine, the global TurtleStitch community friends will embroider & mail you your design!

TurtleStitching is a mix of art, design and technology. It affords a rich area of exploration for beginners and experts. The i...
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Room 4
Workshop

Join your friends and meet new ones in ohyay!

Hallway
Hallway Track

09:00 AM PDT


Don't forget to stand up and take a quick break! :)

Hallway
Short Breaks

09:15 AM PDT

Jens Mönig

The overall theme of Snap! development in the past year has been to foster "togetherness", such as:

  • SLOP (Several Learners One Project): Identify meaningful units of exchange and support packaging and sharing them, such as sprites, media resources, blocks libraries, single scripts, single custom block definitions. New feature: Bundle dependencies together with the code to sh...
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Plenary
Plenaries

10:15 AM PDT


Take a break and eat some food, and catch up with friends in the Hallway track.

Hallway
Breaks

10:45 AM PDT

Jadga Hügle

Our first round of lightning talks! Please look at the list of talks below.

Plenary
Plenaries


W. Monty Jones, Glen Bull

W. Monty Jones - Virginia Commonwealth University Rachel Gibson, Glen Bull, and Jo Watts - University of Virginia

TuneScope (tunescope.org) is an extension of Snap! with additional music blocks. (Note: it is possible that by the conference, these ...

Xavier Pi

The presented Low-Code minimal metaverse controlled by Snap! has been developed to help postgraduate students to understand the notion of I4.0 components, which are the fundamental building blocks of Industry 4.0...

Ken Kahn

Consider the task of searching the Snap! manual. String matching cannot take into account synonyms, different ways of saying the same thing, or different spelling conventions. In this Snap! project sentence embeddings are used to compare the user's quer...

Dan Garcia

The International Space Station (ISS) circles the earth many times a day at an altitude of about 250 miles. It continuously streams data down to Mission Control in Houston. The ISS National Laboratory has teamed up with UC Berkeley to build engaging cur...

Yuan Garcia

In this lightning talk, I will advocate for things that could improve how users get help in Snap!:

  • Fill in the gaps of missing help screens. That is, there’s no help screens for “reshape”, or any dropdown menu functions (e.g., under “sqrt”, or “len...

11:45 AM PDT


Don't forget to stand up and take a quick break! :)

Hallway
Short Breaks

12:00 PM PDT

Brian Broll

This is a panel all about Snap integrations and extensions! This panel is designed for both tool developers, educators, and Snap users. Our panel will first present some of their own notable extensions then discuss topics including: - different methods of integration - "dream" extensions that they would like to see - favorite extension (excluding their own)

Room 1
Panel

Bob Kahn, Dave Briccetti, Delnavaz Dastur, Dan Garcia

The BJC Sparks curriculum is a functional-first, multiple-programming-paradigm curriculum intended for students in Middle School and early High School that teaches computer science using Snap! and MicroBlocks. It is a novel computer science curriculum founded on the principles of functional programming, but also teaching (and reaping the benefits of) imperative, object-oriented, and event-ba...
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Room 2
Panel

Georgia Gouros

Audience: teachers and students (Year 9 to Year 12) Presenter: Georgia Gouros, Virtual School Victoria, Melbourne, Australia Website: https://sites.google.com/view/msgsvce/

Stacks, Queues, Priority Queues, Dictionaries and Graphs are very useful structures for stori...
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Room 3
Workshop

13:00 PM PDT


Don't forget to stand up and take a quick break! :)

Hallway
Short Breaks

2022-08-05

08:00 AM PDT

Tilman Michaeli

The possibilities of artificial intelligence and its influence on our everyday lives are expanding rapidly. To participate in an increasingly digital world and make informed decisions about AI and its impact on our society, everyone needs a basic understanding of AI. However, it is important not only to explain the corresponding phenomena, but also to enable everyone to actively shape this w...
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Room 1
Workshop

Paul Goldenberg, June Mark, Kristen Reed, Zak Kolar, Deborah Spencer, Kathryn Chiappinelli, Kate Coleman

Names and Affiliations of Presenters: • Paul Goldenberg, Education Development Center (EDC) • June Mark, EDC • Deborah Spencer, EDC • Kristen Reed, EDC • Kate Coleman, EDC • Katie Chiappinelli, EDC • Zachary Kolar, Waltham Public Schools

Significance and Relevance of the Topic: The Math+C project at Education Development Center (EDC) is developing m...
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Room 2
Workshop

Joan Guillén

Snap! Moodle plugins

Snap!

Link to Materials and Workshop online spaces

Add to your Moodle activities the ability to include Snap! projects

Room 3
Workshop

Brendan Henrique, Jadga Hügle, Victoria Phelps

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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Room 4
Workshop

Join your friends and meet new ones in ohyay!

Hallway
Hallway Track

09:00 AM PDT


Don't forget to stand up and take a quick break! :)

Hallway
Short Breaks

09:15 AM PDT

Mary Fries

After seven years of developing Snap! projects for teaching programming, a lead Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) curriculum developer shares their favorite projects. Come explore favorites selected for learning potential, appeal, opportunities for customization, and overall simplicity from both the BJC CSP course for high school and the new BJC Sparks course for middle school and e...
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Plenary
Plenaries

10:15 AM PDT


Take a break and eat some food, and catch up with friends in the Hallway track.

Hallway
Breaks

10:45 AM PDT

Brian Broll

Another round of lightning talks!

Plenary
Plenaries


Ken Kahn

Using Snap!'s primitive to POST messages one can access machine learning models to incorporate AI services to

  • Translate between languages.
  • Classify text into categories you choose.
  • Produce a summary of text.
  • Hold a conversation.
  • Quer...

Nathan Berry

The Absraction Obstruction, or Is The Beginning The End or Can We Get To The Destination If We Haven't even arrived at the Start Yet?

I can't code. I've tried for years to do it, but text based languages drive me up the wall, and then I discovere...

Akos Ledeczi

A pair of NetsBlox services provide a variety of options to Wordle and Snap!/NetsBlox enthusiasts to engage with the new favorite pastime of our time. The WordGuess service lets the user start a new game by making the server pick a word. If it is a 5-le...

김태령, Taeryeong Kim

This Lightning Talk is a program that makes it possible to learn the principles of artificial intelligence using block programming. In most cases, AI is implemented through text programming (eg Python), but a small number of learners learn the principle...

한선관

  • Significance and Relevance of the Topic: The educational environment is being completely changed by Covid-19. The problems the world faces today have become difficult to solve with human power alone. Humans need very much cooperation with software (...

Jadga Hügle

(This could also be a 20 minute talk where I show the 2 projects)

In this workshop, I want to show how to create a pixel graphic drawing program for Turtlestitch: https://www.turtlestitch.org/run#cloud:Username=jadga&ProjectName=Karten%20Hopp The pr...

Alexandra Abramova

With the block-based programming language Snap!, playful and visual programming projects can be realised in lessons at different grade levels. The focus for the pupils is on development and programming. For the teacher, however, the subsequent problem i...

Markus Gaelli

As “Snap! is Scheme disguised as Scratch” we should be able to do evolutionary programming pretty easily: We all know the creation of the “vee” where we shuffle around some kind of L(indenmayer)-expressions. How about adding a fitness function and let a...

11:30 AM PDT

Devin Jean

Block-based languages like Snap! have become mainstay tools for introducing programming to students of all ages. The simple interface and restrictions on block connections allow users to easily find program behaviors they want to use and mitigate many of the types of syntax errors that would be possible and typical for new learners using textual languages. This strong foundation is ideal for...
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Plenary
Talk

11:45 AM PDT


Don't forget to stand up and take a quick break! :)

Hallway
Short Breaks

12:00 PM PDT

Jadga Hügle, Jens Mönig, Bernat Romagosa

Students deal with cryptography and security every day, e.g. by picking passwords for online accounts. We all know about basic cryptography from inventing secret languages with our friends. But how does cryptography actually work? How did Caesar get secret messages to his army? How can you send messages safely over the internet?

In this talk we want to share an outline on a new openS...
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Room 1
Talk

Elaine Wolfe

In this talk, I will compare the different coding aspects of creating a one line drawing by Picasso and a Waclaw Szpakowski’s rhythmical line drawing in TurtleStitch.

To create a Picasso one line drawing, the image is added to the stage area by the Import command. This image becomes the background and is then traced point by point along the edge of the image. The tracing program is ...
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Room 2
Talk

Glen Bull

Rachel Gibson, Glen Bull, Jo Watts - University of Virginia Online Talk

A drum track establishes the rhythm or beat for music. Many cultures are known for rhythms and drum patterns that are characteristic of their music. In this talk, patterns from several cultures include Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe will be explored. The format will consist of these elements:

    ...
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Room 3
Talk

12:20 PM PDT

Miles Berry

The session begins by revisiting some of Papert's writing, including '20 Things to do with a Computer' (with Solomon) and Mindstorms. We'll look at how many of the insights from his work remain relevant today, particu...
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Room 1
Talk

Margaret Low, Helen Luckhurst

Link to presentation in powerpoint

Stitch in Time Resources: www.warwick.ac.uk/stitchintime

Warwick TurtleStitch Resources (Primary Maths, Skills,...
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Room 2
Talk

Jesus Villalobos

In close communication with Jens Moenig and Dariusz Dorożalski, developers of The Beauty and Joy of Computing at UC Berkeley have designed implemented a new feature that allows users to share code through script pics!! This feature has opened the doors to starter code libraries, sprite transport, and even autograding! We are excited to share our work!

Room 3
Talk

12:40 PM PDT

Gordon Stein

Last Snap!con, we demonstrated an in-development version of a tool for students to use simulated robots in NetsBlox. This year, we have a new version, already being used in classrooms. You can control virtual robots with block-based code, in a 3D world, entirely in your browser. To go along with NetsBlox’s other collaboration tools, the environments are networked, allowing students working a...
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Room 1
Talk

Michael Aschauer, Andrea Mayr-Stalder

Turtlestitch (TS) is a free platform, based on Snap!, enabling users to generate patterns for embroidery machines. It is easy to use, requiring no prior knowledge in programming, yet powerful in creating novel patterns for embroidery. It is widely used as a tool for innovative workshops, within and outside formal educational institutions, combining an introduction to programming with a hapti...
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Room 2
Talk

Harley Lara, Ilgar Rasulov, Rolf Becker, Ali Farzizada

Snap! and AI

The talk will follow the process of classifying an image based on Snap! programming, sending it to the Jetson nano to analyze the image and reading it back to Snap for display and interaction, by tracking objects and following objects.

Snap! is used to tak...
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Room 3
Talk

13:00 PM PDT


Don't forget to stand up and take a quick break! :)

Hallway
Short Breaks

13:15 PM PDT


Hang out in ohyay with everyone.

Hallway
Plenaries

2022-08-06

08:00 AM PDT

Harley Lara, Ilgar Rasulov, Ali Farzizada, Rolf Becker

Hands-on Workshop on Combining Snap! with the NVIDIA Jetson AI Embedded Systems

Together we will create a Snap! game based on fruits and vegetables detection (image classification).
Local and remote attendance possible!

Trainers: Harley, Ilgar, Ali and Rolf (in Heidelberg)

We will use the NVIDIA Jetson Nano computers we brought ...
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Room 1
Workshop

Ken Kahn

Snap! has the ability to make projects that define, train, and use neural network models. All that is necessary are list and arithmetic operations. But even with hyperblocks and the ability to compile blocks the programs will run several times slower than similar programs that use the Graphics Processor Unit (GPU). But speed isn't the only roadblock to integrating neural networks into your p...
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Room 2
Workshop

Join your friends and meet new ones in ohyay!

Hallway
Hallway Track

09:00 AM PDT


Don't forget to stand up and take a quick break! :)

Hallway
Short Breaks

09:15 AM PDT

Brian Harvey

Snap! 8.0 has several new features to enable metaprogramming: writing programs about programs. In this talk I'll present some of the history of metaprogramming in the Lisp family, especially Logo and Scheme, both of which have contributed many ideas to Snap!. Where do we stand relative to the state of the art?

Plenary
Plenaries

10:15 AM PDT


Take a break and eat some food, and catch up with friends in the Hallway track.

Hallway
Breaks

10:45 AM PDT

Brendan Henrique

In the past year, I have had the unique experience of teaching students (and teachers) Snap!. As a graduate student instructor for the Beauty and Joy of Computing I taught college students, as a lead instructor for the BJC pre-college academy I taug...
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Room 1
Talk

Eckart Modrow

In a video is shown how to use some of the SciSnap! libraries in different projects. Examples include accessing SQL databases, searching a family-tree, image or sound compression with Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), machine learning techniques such as ID3, k-means, DBSCAN and outlier detection, and q-learning, as well as some of Stephen Wolfram's cellular automata.

Room 2
Talk

11:05 AM PDT

Ogechi Shadamoro

Why is a longer format necessary?: The need for an additional time is to discuss he idea behind the creations and the story line it projects. Also to showcase the design thinking technique of a 9 year old child in creating designs with the snap platform and block codes.

If necessary, would you be willing to present this topic as a lightning talk?: Y...
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Room 1
Talk

Brian Broll

Many existing approaches to bringing machine learning to blocks-based programming environments rely on embedded JavaScript or external APIs for the underlying model. As a result, some of the central aspects of the training or inference process are opaque to the user and limits the how deeply the process can be probed and understood.

In this talk, we present our recent work where we ...
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Room 2
Talk

11:25 AM PDT

Bob Kahn

The purpose of this project was to show 7th and 8th grade students how to program an interactive Conjugation Machine for regular Spanish verbs. Students had varying degrees of programming experience from none to a lot. The project involved creating a microworld (the truly new awesome feature of Snap! 7.0) so that students only had the blocks needed to create the machine. Programming concepts...
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Room 1
Talk

Isaac Merritt

The Data Science In Snap! (DASIS) library allows students without prior programming experience to learn and explore Data Science Principles. The DASIS library brings new functionality to Snap! with support for data tables and visualization. DASIS is featured in a new series of online modules located at https://cs10.org...
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Room 2
Talk

11:45 AM PDT


Don't forget to stand up and take a quick break! :)

Hallway
Short Breaks

12:00 PM PDT

Kelsey Derringer

During this live, interactive session, participants will code and control real mini golfing robots remotely, LIVE! Using our online video and coding platform, CodeJoy.Live, watch as your code controls our cardboard robots during our Robot Mini Golf session. Play along with our main character Elby, chat with Matt the Robot, and code and control real robots remotely!

During the worksh...
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Room 1
Workshop

Jordi Binefa

As a teacher of vocational training and master postgraduate, and engineer, I have developed a couple of OSHW boards (S4A PLB and IoT-02 board). S4a PLB is for teaching basic programming (using snap4arduino)...
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Room 2
Talk

12:20 PM PDT

Bambi Brewer

Block-based languages have been used in education to enable beginners to focus on the ideas and logic of computer science without having to focus on syntax. These advantages hold for beginners of all ages, but the common narrative emphasizes the use of block-based languages for younger grades with the idea that students “graduate” to text-based programming languages after having some experie...
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Room 2
Talk

12:40 PM PDT

Anthony Gordon

The NFS 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. https://tinyurl.com/bdejtmf9

Steve Holmes (the developer of the BirdBrain Technologies Hummingbird proprietary micro:bit connector software interface...
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Room 2
Talk
UC Berkeley

13:00 PM PDT


Don't forget to stand up and take a quick break! :)

Hallway
Short Breaks

13:15 PM PDT


Hang out in ohyay with everyone.

Hallway
Plenaries

2022-08-07

08:00 AM PDT

Bernat Romagosa

The Snap!shot hit returns! Join us for a face-paced round of some awesome things Snap! users have built. No slides allowed here, just neat projects from the community.

Plenary
Plenaries


Yuan Garcia, Dan Garcia

This is a show-your-project submission, we won't need any more than 3 minutes. We made a dashed-line function that lets you change the line pattern to any kind of dashed line (solid1, space1, solid2, space2, etc). We think of this as an extension of the...

Ken Kahn

This implements a conversation with GPT-3 or Jurassic 1. It adds a prompt to keep the conversation friendly and adds the recent conversation (or a designed one if the conversation is new). You can use any of the 4 GPT-3 models or either of the 2 Jurassi...

Michael Ball

I'll demo how to use Snap! 8 features to get an overview of the blocks used in student projects.

Brian Broll

An interactive project for training a generator and discriminator interactively (using a simple "circle classifier" rather than a full-blown neural network).

https://editor.netsblox.org/?action=present&Username=brian&ProjectName=Circle%20GAN&

Dan Garcia

https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=dan%20garcia&ProjectName=3D%20Plotting%20of%202D%20Array%20Data

I've always been fond of isometric 3D projections (in which cubes look like three symmetric 60º-120º-60º-120º rhombi) https://ww...

Brian Broll

This is a simple game where the user is trying to find the minimum of an unknown function. This is a prerequisite to some of the ML work used to develop intuition about gradient descent before learning about it explicitly.

https://editor.netsblox.org...

Joachim Wedekind

Simulations of models of dynamic systems always have the same structure. I present a simple framework (a prototype) to make simulations of various models. https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=jowede&ProjectName=a%20simulation%20system

Brian Broll

This project starts as a Parson's problem for implementing the DT-building algorithm. Then we visualize the tree learned from a synthetic Twitter dataset and a real-world phishing dataset.

Starter Template: https://editor.netsblox.org/?action=present...


Join your friends and meet new ones in ohyay!

Hallway
Hallway Track

09:00 AM PDT


Don't forget to stand up and take a quick break! :)

Hallway
Short Breaks

09:15 AM PDT

Jens-Peter Knemeyer, Nicole Marmé

More info coming soon!

Plenary
Plenaries

10:15 AM PDT


Take a break and eat some food, and catch up with friends in the Hallway track.

Hallway
Breaks

10:45 AM PDT

Richard Millwood

This Birds-of-a-Feather session is to celebrate seven years of Turtlestitch activity in an international community context, sustained by Scratch and Snap conferences over the years. Participants will be invited to share their experiences, projects and new ideas and discuss how Turtlestitch is inspiring learners, mathematicians and artists throughout the world.

Room 1
Birds of a Feather

Brian Broll

There are a number of different approaches to automated assessment and feedback in Snap (and Snap extensions) including work from NCSU, Vanderbilt, and Berkeley (among others!). If you are interested in automated assessment, join us to talk about current research directions, existing tools, and get connected with other like-minded people!

Room 2
Birds of a Feather

Glen Bull, John Maloney

Snap! can communicate with microcontrollers enabling users to interact with physical objects. This Birds of a Feather session will provide opportunities to discuss and demonstrate current ways of accomplishing this.

Snap! can communicate with microcontrollers enabling users to interact with physical objects. This Birds of a Feather session will provide opportunities...
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Room 3
Birds of a Feather

11:15 AM PDT

Glen Bull

Jo Watts, Rachel Gibson, Glen Bull and W. Monty Jones

Many examples of music are featured on the Snap! web site. We are interested in exploring music through coding in Snap! and would like to meet others who also have this interest. Therefore, we would like to propose a Birds of a Feather session devoted to this topic.

Room 1
Birds of a Feather

Dan Stormont

Snap! can be a valuable tool for introducing high school students to concepts of computer science. Whether Snap! is used for introductory classes, like the Introduction to Computer Science curriculum developed by the Microso...
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Room 2
Birds of a Feather

11:45 AM PDT


Don't forget to stand up and take a quick break! :)

Hallway
Short Breaks

12:00 PM PDT

Michael Ball, Jens Mönig, Brian Harvey, Bernat Romagosa

We'll share our reflections on what's next for Snap!, but come with questions! We'll close out Snap!Con with a group discussion.

Plenary
Plenaries

13:00 PM PDT


Don't forget to stand up and take a quick break! :)

Hallway
Short Breaks