Program for Snap!shot 2021

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2021-12-11

09:00 AM PST

Jens Mönig

What’s new in Snap! 7?

Main Room
Keynote

09:35 AM PST


Take a break and stretch! :)

Main Room
Breaks

09:45 AM PST

Marnie Hill

Reminder: Due to the quick schedule, lightning talk times are approximate! Times are likely to be off by a few minutes.**

The order for round 1 will be:

  1. Geode Quest - Exploring The Soma Cube Solutions With SNAP! And Edgy , Edward Vogel
  2. Machine Learning of how you rate “Noisy Polygons”, Ken Kahn
  3. A Six-Year-Old’s Take on Snap!, Cinnapoca...
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Main Room
Lightning Talk

09:50 AM PST

Edward Vogel

We present some interesting discoveries regarding the Soma Cube. Equivalence classes forming aesthetically pleasing shapes in the puzzle’s solution set. These gems are identified by subgraph isomorphisms using SNAP! and Edgy, enabling researchers from middle school to undergraduate to explore elementary ideas in graph, group theory and topology.

Main Room
Lightning Talk

09:55 AM PST

Ken Kahn

The Noisy Polygon project that draws "polygons" with the inputs for size, angle, pen width, and color randomly chosen between a range of values. You rate each generated noisy polygon and then a machine learning program is trained to predict how you will rate new polygons. One application ...
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Main Room
Lightning Talk

10:00 AM PST

Cinnapoca

  1. How (and why) I started using Snap! this year...
  2. Why I love Snap!
  3. A quick tour of Mungeons! (Math Dungeons)
  4. How much easier it was to write it in Snap! than Scratch
  5. Things I still want to learn about Snap!...

Main Room
Lightning Talk

10:05 AM PST

Bernat Romagosa

The Demoscene is a computer art movement that was born out of the cracker community in the 1980s and evolved into a worldwide phenomenon of its own that's still going on today.

I will talk a bit about the origins of the movement, and also showcase a couple of re-implementations of classic Demoscene algorithms in Snap!.

Main Room
Lightning Talk

10:10 AM PST

Devinjean

We present a Python IDE that preserves many of the affordances of Snap! and NetsBlox while giving students the full power of Python. PyBlox supports the concepts of the stage, sprites, costumes, etc. Most notably, it mimics the concurrency model of Snap! Furthermore, all NetsBlox RPCs and message passing are supported. However, PyBlox is not browser-based and neither is it lively; the progra...
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Main Room
Lightning Talk

10:15 AM PST

David Thornburg

The presenter just added a book on Snap! to his long record of writing books about Logo-ish lasnguages. This book explores a variety of topics, including patterns in nature, and promotes good programming practices like recursion - a topic that many beginners struggle with. Topics have a strong math focus, including the geometry of plants and the Golden Mean.

Main Room
Lightning Talk

10:20 AM PST


Take a break! Step away and stretch. Grab some food.

Main Room
Breaks

10:30 AM PST

Jadga Hügle

Reminder: Due to the quick schedule, lightning talk times are approximate! Times are likely to be off by a few minutes.**

The order for round 2 will be:

  1. Exploring computer graphics from the hardware up in pure MicroBlocks, John Maloney, Turgut Guneysu
  2. Machine Learning with the Finch Robot, Bambi Brewer
  3. Using Snap! To compile images int...
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Main Room
Lightning Talk

10:35 AM PST

John Maloney, Turgut Guneysu

An inexpensive 128x64 pixel monochrome OLED display connected to a micro:bit V2 allows us to explore bitmapped computer graphics from the hardware level up, including lines, circles, and turtle graphics.

Starting from the ability to display a 1024 byte buffer as a bitmap, we will show how one can progress from controlling individual pixels to drawing lines and circles. If time allows...
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Main Room
Lightning Talk

10:40 AM PST

Bambi Brewer

Given the prevalence of news stories about artificial intelligence and machine learning, many middle and high school teachers are eager to incorporate these topics into their classes. We have created a series of Snap! projects and related instructional materials that combine robotics and machine learning to introduce important concepts such as training, testing, and using a model in a progra...
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Main Room
Lightning Talk

10:45 AM PST

John Maloney, Turgut Guneysu

Our new MicroBlocks library can display monochrome images on an inexpensive 128x64 pixel display connected to a microcontroller. But we had a problem: tiny microcontrollers such as the micro:bit lack a file system, so there is no place to store image files! Our solution was to embed the image data directly in the program as code.

We will show how Snap! can be used to prepare an image...
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Main Room
Lightning Talk

10:50 AM PST

Gordon Stein

At Snap!Con 2021 we demonstrated a platform for students to drive robots with block-based programs in a shared virtual space to reduce costs and enable collaboration no matter the distance between learners. Much of the feedback we received requested that we make it more accessible, adding compatibilit...
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Main Room
Lightning Talk

10:55 AM PST

Aaron Baker

Children offer us a profound view into the building blocks of human cognitive capacities and how they emerge. Developmental psychologists utilize game-like environments in the lab to understand how children reason about the world around them. More recently, psychologists are adopting virtual methods for conducting activities with children and turning their attention toward the ways in which ...
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Main Room
Lightning Talk

11:00 AM PST

Efrain Lopez

At IDEA Public Schools, a charter school network with about 40 high schools, we have expanded AP CS Principles to 30+ schools. Last year, 20 schools were using Code.org curriculum, but this year we have randomized 15 schools into Code.org and 15 schools into BJC as part of a comparison study. This talk will explain the system in place to ensure support for teachers and school leaders in im...
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Main Room
Lightning Talk

11:05 AM PST

Tiffany Lucey

How many times do students ask when will I ever use this? I've worked with staff across disciplines to integrate coding into lessons. See how Arduino sing alternate endings to Beowulf or how students use block based languages to create games aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goals all through the maker lens.

Main Room
Lightning Talk

11:10 AM PST


Join us in ohyay or go get something to eat!

Main Room
Breaks

11:20 AM PST

Bernat Romagosa

Reminder: Due to the quick schedule, lightning talk times are approximate! Times are likely to be off by a few minutes.**

Main Room
Show Your Project

11:25 AM PST

Dan Garcia

(4 minutes) I created a Snap! project that helps with playing the Sudoku and "Letter Boxed" NY Times puzzles. My 12yo daughter and I started playing NY Times Sudoku together (https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/sudoku/hard) -- neither of us had ever really played before, I missed the early wave when everyone was playing it ...
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Main Room
Show Your Project

11:30 AM PST

Thomas Price

These projects demonstrate a new interactive video recording and playback feature in Snap. Students watch a video lecture in the Snap IDE, with all of the instructors actions played for them in time to the audio. Students can pause at any point to interact with the code the instructor creates.

This is still a prototype, and many features are not finished, but these projects ...
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Main Room
Show Your Project

11:35 AM PST

Brian Broll, Thomas Price

This project is designed to teach programming basics (loops, variables, procedures, conditionals) through a fun-to-create game. The game is genuinely interesting and enjoyable, based on the Okay? app with millions of downloads, but students can create almo...
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Main Room
Show Your Project

11:40 AM PST

Thomas Price

These projects demonstrate prototype game engine and physics engine features for Snap (on a separate instance). The game engine extension is just a demo / work in progress, but current features allow students to create powerful games:

  • Camera blocks allow the programmer to move the camera around the stage's world, beyond the usual 480x360 dimensions. Blocks all...
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Main Room
Show Your Project

11:45 AM PST

Jesus Villalobos

We have modified Snap! to be able to embed the XML for the script (or block) inside the PNG file as metadata. When you drag the PNG back onto Snap! it asks you whether you'd like to import it as a picture/costume or as a script/block...

Main Room
Show Your Project

11:50 AM PST

Cinnapoca

A math game made by a six-year-old girl.

Main Room
Show Your Project

11:55 AM PST

Yuan Garcia

We made a small Filled Graphics Library in Snap! (using JavaScript). This is important because Snap! mostly draws lines and it's hard to draw solid shapes (especially with curves). This library allows Snap! users to include filled wedges, ellipses, and parallelograms in their projects. Unlike the raw JavaScript which uses the world coordinate system, we follow the turtle graphics model from ...
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Main Room
Show Your Project

12:00 PM PST

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. This demo will showcase the main features of the DASIS library, including: data importation from a data file, table creation, basic table manipulation, a...
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Main Room
Show Your Project

12:05 PM PST

Simon Walters

The Mayflower MAS400 is an AI craft designed to cross the Atlantic ocean autonomously. I wrote a project to track it's progress and showed it off at Snap!Con21.

Since then, it's been polished quite a lot, so I think an update report is in order :)

https://mas400.com

Main Room
Show Your Project

12:10 PM PST

so.vaibhavi

My proposal is about fish because the TOTM Topic Of The Mouth was all about fish and it took me about 2-3 days to make it.

Main Room
Show Your Project

12:15 PM PST

Zcyyt

https://snap.berkeley.edu/project?user=zcyyt&project=ZCYos%202.0%3A%20Snap!%20Edition The Project

ZCYos is the first OS in Snap! Made with Snapinator to convert it from Sb3 to XML. Features are: Control Panel, Time (EST), ZCYweb, 3rd Party Apps (Comment an app su...
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Main Room
Show Your Project

12:20 PM PST

Jo Watts

TuneScope uses the W3C Web Audio API to extend the music capabilities of Snap!. A looping pedal allows a musician to capture and repeat music tracks to create a song. The TuneScope MIDI Capture block enables a music track to be captured using a MIDI keyboard in the same manner as a traditional looping pedal. The TuneScope looping blocks will be demonstrated in this presentation.

Main Room
Show Your Project

12:25 PM PST


Join us after the event for some socialization time.

Social Room
Social Hour