Running Snap! on your laptop?

Enthusiastic Hugo User — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 11:13:58 AEDT

Q: “Can I run Snap! on my personal computer, or some other computer outside of the lab?”
A: Yes of course! – and we’re including another tip for saving and loading your programs.

Simply point your browser (the latest version of Chrome preferred) to a Snap! instance, such as https://artofcomputing.cecs.anu.edu.au/snap/snap.html and you are good to go!

What you are looking at is a blank Snap! instance, you may wonder how to load/save your work in Snap!, or look at pre-existing programs, as what we did in the warm-up excercise.

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?

The first way is to load the program from a file saved on your computer in so-called xml format. If you click on the paper icon at the upper left hand side of the Snap! window, you will see a menu item that says “Import …” (see picture below). Click on it, and you will be presented with a file chooser. Choose your local xml file, wait, and voila! - the program appears in your workspace.

Now with test your setup with the Canon in the warm-up programs.

Save the program xml somewhere to your computer, e.g. the desktop. http://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/demo/kanon.xml.
Load this program via the “Import … ” menu, test that it runs.
Change something in the program, and then user “export project … ” to save your work to disk.

The second way is by encoding the URL that contain the program - i.e., the keyword “#open:” followed by an ULR to the xml file. For example, as was done in the warm-up excercise: http://artofcomputing.cecs.anu.edu.au/snap/snap.html#open:http://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/demo/kanon.xml.

A first look at Snap!

Enthusiastic Hugo User — Thu, 01 Jan 2015 11:13:58 AEDT

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?

Snap on The Art of Computing

Running Snap! on your laptop?

A first look at Snap!