Presented by:

Dan Garcia

from UC Berkeley

Dan Garcia is a Teaching Professor in the EECS department at UC Berkeley. He was selected as an ACM Distinguished Educator in 2012 and ACM Distinguished Speaker in 2019, and is a national leader in the "CSforALL" movement, bringing engaging computer science to students normally underrepresented in the field.

Thanks to four National Science Foundation grants, the "Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC)" non-majors course he co-developed has been shared with over 800 high school teachers. He is delighted to regularly have more than 50% female enrollment in BJC, with a high mark of 65% in the Spring of 2018, shattering the campus record for an intro computing course, and is among the highest in the nation! He is humbled by the international exposure he and the course have received in the New York Times, PBS, NPR, and others media outlets. He is working on the BJC Middle School curriculum.

Bob Kahn

from Brentwood School, Los Angeles

Bob teaches the middle school introductory robotics and introductory coding courses at Brentwood School in Los Angeles. He is also the middle school Educational Technology Specialist. He taught middle school science for many years. In the spring 2011, an email inspired Bob to use technology to increase student engagement and learning. That Fall, he started a Minecraft club and within a few years was programming and building robots. Bob so appreciates being a part of communities, such as that of Snap!, that strive to create engaging and meaningful educational experiences using technologies to foster student creativity and agency. My black lab mix, Lily, is my profile picture.

Dave Briccetti

from Dave Briccetti Software LLC, The Athenian School, St. Perpetua School

Dave is a computer programming teacher for kids, professional software developer, community technology and music volunteer, open source software developer, creator of educational videos, and blogger.

Volunteer Hosts
Thanks for helping with Snap!Con 2022!

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-based paradigms. We are proudly (pure) functions-first, emphasizing abstraction, domain and range, functional decomposition, immutable data with a state-free experience, and the use of powerful higher-order functions such as map, keep, and combine.

We launched it with twenty pilot teachers in the summer of 2021, and solicited teachers for this panel from that group who will share:

  • The greatest Snap! projects they saw this year
  • Snap! features that would make their life easier
  • Their evolution in learning Snap! yourself
  • The elements of Snap! that engaged their students the most

Even better, if we are able to arrange it with the students' parents, we look forward to welcome a small cohort of their actual students (maybe 2-3 per teacher) to hear their experiences and maybe see their projects (if they did not just come from lab).

Duration:
1 h
Room:
Room 2
Conference:
Snap!Con 2022
Type:
Panel