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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 “length”), or the hidden blocks available only under “relabel” (e.g., “atan2”, “max”).
• Fix the minor bugs in existing help screens. For example, the help screen in the “numbers from _ to _” says the range has to be ascending, but that’s not true anymore.
• Translation of the help screens to all the languages Snap! supports, which might mean we move from a “picture”-based help to one that has text placed over pictures, allowing the text to be translated (perhaps by Google, perhaps by hand) without having to change the pictures.
• When appropriate (e.g., for blocks in the animation library), have videos instead of the static help screens with closed captioning (that could be auto-translated, so the same video could be used for all languages).
• Libraries: When the user selects a library (before clicking import), they could see a video introduction to the overall library, what each block does (maybe the help picture/movie for each block could be viewable, not just a one-line text description), and there would be a “tool sprite” that gets loaded with the library (maybe named for the Library) to show how to use all the new blocks.
• When appropriate, there would be links to the section(s) where that block is referenced in the Snap! manual from within Snap!.
• Finally, there would be a “people who used this block also found the following blocks useful” recommendation system (that pointed, say, a first-time “map” user to experiment with “keep” or “combine”).

This session is a part of: