Program for Snap!Con 2023

Mónica Rikić

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Jens Mönig

Jens will demo some awesome new features in Snap! 9.

Ken Kahn

Using the web services library one can create blocks that send prompts to GPT-3, GPT-4, Cohere, Jurrassic 1, and other large language models. These blocks report the "completions" returned by these API calls. I'll present five sample projects using these blocks:

Conversations wi...
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sladescar

There is a new niche on Snap! that was popularized by one project, SnipOS. Created by sladescar in mid-2022, it was not the first OS Simulator on Snap!, and wasn't the most popular.

SnipOS2 started changing things, instead of only 1 project, there was multiple project for the major updates, instead of all the updates staying on 1 project.

It started attracting more and more p...
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Bambi Brewer

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Roger Olivella

‘Scratch Jr Tactile’ is a new resource designed to include all the students in creative tangible coding experiences. In this talk, you’ll discover the research supporting it and experiences from schools in New York (USA) and Barcelona (Spain). Intended for students with visual impairment but designed for all the students to play and learn together, ‘Scratch Jr Tactile’ is creating a communit...
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Gamificat, Bernat Romagosa

During the conference we'll have a physical, full-sized arcade cabinet that runs Snap! games at the Citilab. This Snap! arcade machine, the second one that we've built, was commissioned in 2019 by Lleialtat Santsenca, a community center in the district of Sants, Barcelona. In this workshop we are going to create games for the machine that conference attendees will be able to play during the ...
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Mark Guzdial

“Computer science” was invented as something that should be taught to everyone in order to facilitate learning other subjects and to reduce the danger of having this powerful new technology controlled by only a few. Computing education has not become the democratizing force that early computer scientists imagined. Only a privileged class understands and creates a critical part of our world. ...
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StephenHowell

Pose2Blocks is software that changes the way we interact with Snap! programming by incorporating body movements, gestures, and even dancing(!) as control inputs. Building on Kinect2Scratch(1), Pose2Blocks utilizes machine learning models to estimate skeletal joint positions from a simple consumer webcam, making the technology more accessible and compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux operat...
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Bernat Romagosa

By a rather cheeky stretch of the word "metaprogramming", I will be demonstrating how to get a microcontroller to self-program itself. But in case that isn't cheeky enough, and by twisting the meaning of yet another word, I will also boldly and loudly claim that MicroBlocks now has support for macros.

Simon Mong

Geometry blocks library is an extension of TurtleStitch. It consists of a set of blocks used to draw shapes and patterns. Each block has a lambda input named "style" which enables them to be combined with each other to make more complicated and interesting designs.

In this talk I am going to give usages and examples of geometry blocks and also talk about how I use this library to br...
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Kathy Giori

Many of today's youth were born playing with electronic toys from the time they could hold a rattle. If given the opportunity, they learn to navigate tablets and cellphones easily (before they even go to school). Once children can use a laptop, we want to inspire them to be creators of technology, not just consumers. The goal of this track is to expose the audience to the successful workshop...
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Callietastrophic

A lot of focus on block language is how to transition to python or some language that the teacher themselves learned.

Thus we get a lot of people trying to make snap to *language converters.

The punchline is, you've got blocks, you've got the key already, relying on text is the exact wrong answer to the wrong question. If kids start at Scratch Jr and then migrate to Scratch a...
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Xavier Pi

The current version of Snap offers two ways to build Microworlds, one based on iframes and the other based on its own Snap canvas. Microworlds have been used for educational purposes and management. We present the application of Snap!-based Microworlds to illustrate the Industry 4.0 foundations for comprehension purposes using Digital Twins, which can be built from scratch o integrated from ...
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StephenHowell

We invite you to join our interactive workshop on Pose2Blocks, software that changes the way we interact with Snap! programming by incorporating body movements, gestures, and even dancing(!) as control inputs. Building on Kinect2Scratch(1), Pose2Blocks utilizes machine learning models to estimate skeletal joint positions from a simple consumer webcam, making the technology more accessible an...
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Andrea Mayr-Stalder

We will show how to efficiently run a TurtleStitch workshop in a school or extracurricular setting. Necessary preparation steps to bring together coding, design and making will be covered and lessons learned from experience of conducting a larger number of TS workshops will be shared.

To go through the steps hands-on, we will select two outst...
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Maria Angela Pellegrino

An increasing interest is manifested in Knowledge Graph (KG) publication: the LOD Cloud (a KG that collects most of the published KGs by academia and industry) counted 12 datasets in 2007 and currently contains 1,255 datasets. Because of the extensive range of heterogeneous information stored in KGs, for their easy navigation, thanks to their quantitative and qualitative properties, they cou...
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Brian Broll

There are many resources for practicing text-based programming languages through simple exercises (or "katas") complete with automated tests to ensure the solution is correct. Exercism.io, CodeKata, and CodeWars are a few popular examples. In this workshop, we present a collection of exercises for leveling up skills in NetsBlox, an extension of Snap!. Exercises are designed to cover...
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Margaret Low, Phil Jemmett

Countdown to code: challenge, context, creativity.

STOP! Before you write the first line of code, what should you do? What would you ask your students to do? This talk is not about physical computing – this is about an engaging model for any code-based activity with young people.

There are some students whose eyes light up when they see components, cables, and code. There are...
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Meret Stalder, ablankenhorn

This is a TurtleStitch related talk, addressing one of its major hurdles. Users who don’t own an embroidery machine cannot fully use it. As we love the idea of digital work and handcrafting combined, we want to make this accessible to everybody. In the talk we will describe our ideas for using TurtleStitch without an embroidery machine and will pres...
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Glen Bull, John Maloney, Jo Watts

A microcontroller enables a computer to interact with the physical world. MicroBlocks (https://microblocks.fun) is an educational programming language designed for microcontrollers. Micro:Bridge enables Snap! to interact with a microcontroller via MicroBlocks. This requires:

1. A library of blocks, Micro:Bridge, that is loaded into Snap! a...
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Glen Bull, John Maloney

During the past year, new microcontrollers and new software developments have made it easier than ever to interact with the physical world using Snap! This “Birds of a Feather” session will provide opportunities to discuss different techniques and methods that have emerged during the past year, and the different types of projects made possible by these new capabilities.

Juan David Rodríguez García

In 2019 I started developing LearningML, an educational platform intended to facilitate the teaching of Machine Learning fundamentals through hands-on activities. With this tool, students can generate ML models for text, image and numerical set recognition and make software applications that incorporate these models. The platform consists of an ML model e...
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Brian Harvey

I think that in recent years there has been a change in how we think about the pedagogic role of Snap!, perhaps not intentionally. It has to do with what is hidden and what is shown, broadly speaking. I don't know whether the shift is good or bad; this is not a Policy Proposal, just an invitation to discussion.

The talk will be most interesting to teachers and curriculum d...
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Jordi Binefa, Xavier Pi

IoT Vertebrae is Open Source Hardware ( www.iotvertebrae.com ). It is a protyping hardware platform to be compatible with industrial signal levels. Bridging OT, IT, and makers and the educational community is possible using IoT Vertebrae. In this talk we will use Snap! controlling analog and digital outputs, and reading analog and digital inputs fro...
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鄭福烱

Industry pain points:

Today's application development mostly includes at least three platforms: iOS, Android, and Web. The pain points faced by the industry are as follows: 1. The development cost of multiple teams is high; 2. Different technologies must be familiar with different programming languages and APIs, resulting in higher barriers to development, longer tim...
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Brian Broll

Existing approaches to teaching machine learning often use existing pre-trained, black-box models. Given the appropriate support, we believe fundamental concepts like optimization and adversarial examples can be accessible in a hands-on way to high school students. In this talk, we present some of our recent work in developing a curriculum to teach machine learning concepts in a hands-on way...
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Glen Bull, Jo Watts, Rachel Gibson

The Snap! Arcade combines arcade games developed in Snap! with a joystick and arcade controls housed in a physical enclosure. The hardware consists of a single-board computer such as a Raspberry Pi and a microcontroller. The MicroBlocks “Key and Mouse” library developed by Bernat Romagosa was used to communicate with the microcontroller. The basic proof-of-concept format developed has served...
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Ken Kahn

When constructing JavaScript or Python programs (or others), ChatGPT can generate code, help in debugging, read documentation, explain how some code works, and answer questions about the code. AI-assisted programming is likely the future of programming. It is very empowering. Pedagogically it is a very different experience than current practice with many pros and cons.

But now progr...
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Margaret Low, RobJLow, Phil Jemmett

This workshop session will consider the valuable mathematical concepts that children ages 9 – 11 encounter when creating patterns with TurtleStitch. TurtleStitch is a useful way of teaching mathematics in the classroom, or a means to highlight its application and improving school students fluency. Students are able to create any pattern they wish, provided they can work out how to describe i...
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