Program for Snap!Con 2021

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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