A first look at Snap!
Snap! is is a visual, drag-and-drop programming language. This post aims to give you a bit of its background, and a few pointers to explore.
Designed in UC Berkeley, Snap! is an extension of the visual programming tool Scratch. It does not need specialized hardware or complicated installation, and will run within any modern browser – we recommend a recent version of Chrome.
If you are new to programming, let’s take a sneak peek at the programming environment together, and excute a first snap! program:
Open the Snap! environment via this link, it will automatically load a simple program into the middle gray space. Notice that the ‘program’ consists of a series of blocks colored differently based on their functions. Press the gree flag on its top, or on the upper right-hand-corner of the your browser window to start the program. (With your computer speaker on!), see/hear what happens .
Now open this link, excute the program as above. Can you see/hear how this three-part canon is built from the part above?
If you are an expereinced programmer, you may want to take a look under-the-hood and see how Snap! is implmented on github.
For the even more adventurous, you may want to think about the one or two questions below, and help us improve Snap!
How to add a new block, such as interpreting a string of text (e.g. “March 21, 2012”) as a date?
How do you usually make a program run faster? Can we speed up Snap?
Quick links
- Monday 1200-1300 (PSYC G8)
- Tuesday 1000-1100 (PSYC G8)
- Wednesday 1200-1300 (PSYC G8)