Program for Snap!Con 2023
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Coffee Break (30 minutes) Lunch Break (120 minutes) Escape Room (30 minutes) Hallway Track (510 minutes) Talk (20 minutes)
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10:00 AM CEST
Jadga Hügle
This session will not be on Zoom. We will have an "online" welcome later today.
A welcome message from the organization.
For three days we’ll be coming back to the Citilab to share our passion, projects and pedagogy around blocks based programming and computing educati...
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10:30 AM CEST
Hang out in an open Zoom room and meet with some new friends.
Margaret Low, RobJLow, Phil Jemmett
This workshop session will consider the valuable mathematical concepts that children ages 9 – 11 encounter when creating patterns with TurtleStitch. TurtleStitch is a useful way of teaching mathematics in the classroom, or a means to highlight its application and improving school students fluency. Students are able to create any pattern they wish, provided they can work out how to describe i...
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Nina Coll, Victor Casado, José García
During this workshop we will work on the contents of our workshop Farmlands, plagues and robots. To do that, we’ll see how we can use a Huskylens, an AI camera compatible with electronic boards, and our Citilab ED1 Robot, to recognize images of seven different kinds of plagues.
Also, the robot will have to move across a grid that rep...
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11:30 AM CEST
11:55 AM CEST
Jadga Hügle, Michael Ball, Bernat Romagosa
Welcome to the Snap!Con 2023 online participants!
10 minutes where we'll explain all about the conference to you, if you're joining us online.
Get to know how to join the sessions, how to get in contact with other participants and how to be a part of the hybrid escape room.
12:00 PM CEST
Simon Mong
Geometry blocks library is an extension of TurtleStitch. It consists of a set of blocks used to draw shapes and patterns. Each block has a lambda input named "style" which enables them to be combined with each other to make more complicated and interesting designs.
In this talk I am going to give usages and examples of geometry blocks and also talk about how I use this library to br...
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12:20 PM CEST
鄭福烱
Industry pain points:
Today's application development mostly includes at least three platforms: iOS, Android, and Web. The pain points faced by the industry are as follows: 1. The development cost of multiple teams is high; 2. Different technologies must be familiar with different programming languages and APIs, resulting in higher barriers to development, longer tim...
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12:40 PM CEST
Jordi Binefa, Xavier Pi
IoT Vertebrae is Open Source Hardware ( www.iotvertebrae.com ). It is a protyping hardware platform to be compatible with industrial signal levels. Bridging OT, IT, and makers and the educational community is possible using IoT Vertebrae. In this talk we will use Snap! controlling analog and digital outputs, and read...
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13:00 PM CEST
Juan David Rodríguez García
In 2019 I started developing LearningML, an educational platform intended to facilitate the teaching of Machine Learning fundamentals through hands-on activities. With this tool, students can generate ML models for text, image and numerical set recognition and make software applications that incorporate these models. The platform consists o...
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13:20 PM CEST
StephenHowell
Pose2Blocks is software that changes the way we interact with Snap! programming by incorporating body movements, gestures, and even dancing(!) as control inputs. Building on Kinect2Scratch(1), Pose2Blocks utilizes machine learning models to estimate skeletal joint positions from a simple consumer webcam, making the technology more accessible and compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux operat...
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13:40 PM CEST
Ken Kahn
Using the web services library one can create blocks that send prompts to GPT-3, GPT-4, Cohere, Jurrassic 1, and other large language models. These blocks report the "completions" returned by these API calls. I'll present five sample projects using these blocks:
14:00 PM CEST
Grab some lunch!
We have looong lunch breaks not only because we're in the Mediterranean, but also to give space to self-organized sessions.
Lunch break is also when you'll be able to go to the escape room and try out the Snap! Arcade machine.
14:45 PM CEST
Get ready to fly onboard spaceship Alonsza23 on mission to Pluto at this year's hybrid escape room experience at the Citilab (or online).
The ship's AI, entirely powered by Snap! and MicroBlocks, has gone rogue because of how untidy the ship is, and is threatening to crash into an asteroid unless we do something about it. Both the onboard (in-person) crew and mission control (online)...
view more
15:30 PM CEST
Get ready to fly onboard spaceship Alonsza23 on mission to Pluto at this year's hybrid escape room experience at the Citilab (or online).
The ship's AI, entirely powered by Snap! and MicroBlocks, has gone rogue because of how untidy the ship is, and is threatening to crash into an asteroid unless we do something about it. Both the onboard (in-person) crew and mission control (online)...
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16:00 PM CEST
Jens Mönig
Jens will demo some awesome new features in Snap! 9.
17:00 PM CEST
Glen Bull, John Maloney, Maketolearn
A microcontroller enables a computer to interact with the physical world. MicroBlocks (https://microblocks.fun) is an educational programming language designed for microcontrollers. Micro:Bridge enables Snap! to interact with a microcontroller via MicroBlocks. This requires:
A library of blocks, Micro:Bridge, that is load...
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17:20 PM CEST
Margaret Low, Phil Jemmett
Countdown to code: challenge, context, creativity.
STOP! Before you write the first line of code, what should you do? What would you ask your students to do? This talk is not about physical computing – this is about an engaging model for any code-based activity with young people.
There are some students whose eyes light up when they see components, cables, and code. There are...
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17:40 PM CEST
Brian Broll
Existing approaches to teaching machine learning often use existing pre-trained, black-box models. Given the appropriate support, we believe fundamental concepts like optimization and adversarial examples can be accessible in a hands-on way to high school students. In this talk, we present some of our recent work in developing a curriculum to teach machine learning concepts in a hands-on way...
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18:00 PM CEST
Mark Guzdial
“Computer science” was invented as something that should be taught to everyone in order to facilitate learning other subjects and to reduce the danger of having this powerful new technology controlled by only a few. Computing education has not become the democratizing force that early computer scientists imagined. Only a privileged class understands and creates a critical part of our world. ...
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10:30 AM CEST
Hang out in an open Zoom room and meet with some new friends.
Andrea Mayr-Stalder
We will show how to efficiently run a TurtleStitch workshop in a school or extracurricular setting. Necessary preparation steps to bring together coding, design and making will be covered and lessons learned from experience of conducting a larger number of TS workshops will be shared.
To go through the steps hands-on, we will s...
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StephenHowell
We invite you to join our interactive workshop on Pose2Blocks, software that changes the way we interact with Snap! programming by incorporating body movements, gestures, and even dancing(!) as control inputs. Building on Kinect2Scratch(1), Pose2Blocks utilizes machine learning models to estimate skeletal joint positions from a simple consumer webcam, making the technology more accessible an...
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Fhasselhorn
Higher order functions have not been part of the school curriculum so far. Nor does the speed of programs play a role in the classroom, with the exception of smaller games.
This changed in our classes when, in the last third of a two-year course, we started doing practical cryptanalysis, i.e., studying ciphertexts with unknown keys. The literature usually refers to frequency analysis...
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Maria Angela Pellegrino
An increasing interest is manifested in Knowledge Graph (KG) publication: the LOD Cloud (a KG that collects most of the published KGs by academia and industry) counted 12 datasets in 2007 and currently contains 1,255 datasets. Because of the extensive range of heterogeneous information stored in KGs, for their easy navigation, thanks to their quantitative and qualitative properties, they cou...
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11:30 AM CEST
12:00 PM CEST
Round 1 of lightning talks!
Richard Millwood
The Irish curriculum describes algorithmic core concepts as: "construct algorithms using appropriate sequences, selections/conditionals, loops and operators to solve a range of problems, to fulfil a specific requirement" and the English expect learners ...
Bernat Romagosa
By a rather cheeky stretch of the word "metaprogramming", I will be demonstrating how to get a microcontroller to self-program itself. But in case that isn't cheeky enough, and by twisting the meaning of yet another word, I will also boldly and loudly c...
Meret Stalder, Amelia Blankenhorn
This is a TurtleStitch related talk, addressing one of its major hurdles. Users who don’t own an embroidery machine cannot fully use it. As we love the idea of digital work and handcrafting combined, we want to make this a...
Miguel Castro
We often hear and read in the media on how technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Big Data can perpetuate bias, inequality and social injustice. But what if this type of technology was used to actually achieve the opposite?
Join this lightnin...
12:20 PM CEST
Nina Coll, Victor Casado, José García
At this talk we will share the experience with our workshop Farmlands, plagues and robots that we designed last summer and which we have been teaching since then, both with schools and families.
In this workshop we introduce the children to the concept of Agriculture 4.0, specifically how robots and AI can be useful to farmers and other workers for t...
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12:40 PM CEST
Brian Harvey
I think that in recent years there has been a change in how we think about the pedagogic role of Snap!, perhaps not intentionally. It has to do with what is hidden and what is shown, broadly speaking. I don't know whether the shift is good or bad; this is not a Policy Proposal, just an invitation to discussion.
The talk will be most interesting to teachers and curriculum d...
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13:00 PM CEST
sladescar
There is a new niche on Snap! that was popularized by one project, SnipOS. Created by sladescar in mid-2022, it was not the first OS Simulator on Snap!, and wasn't the most popular.
SnipOS2 started changing things, instead of only 1 project, there was multiple project for the major updates, instead of all the updates staying on 1 project.
It started attracting more and more p...
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13:20 PM CEST
Devin Jean
Snap! is an extremely powerful general programming language, but has historically been trapped running in the browser. There are some existing extensions like Snapp! that allow projects to run as standalone executables, but they are still running on a conventional computer. Even the micro:bit extension for Snap! communicates only over bluetooth, rather than running on the actual hardware. Be...
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14:00 PM CEST
Grab some lunch!
We have looong lunch breaks not only because we're in the Mediterranean, but also to give space to self-organized sessions.
Lunch break is also when you'll be able to go to the escape room and try out the Snap! Arcade machine.
14:45 PM CEST
Get ready to fly onboard spaceship Alonsza23 on mission to Pluto at this year's hybrid escape room experience at the Citilab (or online).
The ship's AI, entirely powered by Snap! and MicroBlocks, has gone rogue because of how untidy the ship is, and is threatening to crash into an asteroid unless we do something about it. Both the onboard (in-person) crew and mission control (online)...
view more
15:30 PM CEST
Get ready to fly onboard spaceship Alonsza23 on mission to Pluto at this year's hybrid escape room experience at the Citilab (or online).
The ship's AI, entirely powered by Snap! and MicroBlocks, has gone rogue because of how untidy the ship is, and is threatening to crash into an asteroid unless we do something about it. Both the onboard (in-person) crew and mission control (online)...
view more
16:00 PM CEST
Zackboston, Cynthia Solomon
Turtlestitch is a great introduction to art, math and technology. TurtleStitch novices and experts are welcome!
TurtleStitch and its arc blocks (which, like a few other primitives, are not included in Snap!) will be used to make a plaque with your favorite SHORT quote. You will be coached in breakout rooms by volunteers from the TurtleStitch community, including youth teachers from...
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Brian Broll
There are many resources for practicing text-based programming languages through simple exercises (or "katas") complete with automated tests to ensure the solution is correct. Exercism.io, CodeKata, and CodeWars are a few popular examples. In this workshop, we present a collection of exercises for leveling up skills in NetsBlox, an extension of Snap!. Exercises are designed to cover...
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Paul Goldenberg, Zak Kolar
Over the last 6+ years, EDC, with funding from the (US) National Science Foundation, has designed and built a set of microworlds in which children use programming as a language to express and explore the mathematics they are learning. Our prior presentations at SnapCon and elsewhere have primarily been about the nature of these worlds, the principles and ideas behind them, and the exciting r...
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17:00 PM CEST
Round 2 of lightning talks!
Callietastrophic
A lot of focus on block language is how to transition to python or some language that the teacher themselves learned.
Thus we get a lot of people trying to make snap to *language converters.
The punchline is, you've got blocks, you've got the key ...
Gordon Stein
Generative AI models, such as Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT have gained significant popularity recently. In this lightning talk, we will demonstrate how we are working to add the ability to use these to NetsBlox, a distributed computing-focused variation...
Dan Garcia
The GAMESMAN system is a piece of software 35 years in the making -- it solves board games (2-person abstract strategy games of no chance), builds a database of the value (win, tie, or lose) for every position, and provides users with a GUI to play and ...
Devin Jean
When making distributed projects with NetsBlox (a fork of Snap which adds networking features), such as a multi-computer orchestra or animation with each computer playing different parts, we sometimes need a way to synchronize all the projects in time. ...
17:20 PM CEST
Ursula Wolz
Introducing a set of activities aligned with TurtleStitch and Snap! that support the development of the mental muscle models used in developing computer code. This work is the most recent version of "Code Crafting" (http://codecrafting-rs.net/) that brings together the essential skills to relate textile crafting and fiber arts to compu...
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17:40 PM CEST
Victoria Phelps, Mary Fries, Dan Garcia
“Hide Blocks” is a transformative new feature that gives Snap! educators and curriculum developers the ability to make a “microworld” project in which only a few blocks are displayed to the user. If a user wishes to use a block that has been hidden, they can simply “unhide” it. We have utilized it extensively in UC Berkeley’s Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) course with our projects and exa...
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18:00 PM CEST
10:30 AM CEST
Hang out in an open Zoom room and meet with some new friends.
Stefano Federici
When using Snap in the classroom, students can find it challenging to follow along when a teacher is presenting an interactive project on an overhead projector. This can be especially true when it's unclear whether the behavior of the project is due to an interaction activated by the teacher or an animation block sequence. To address this issue, we developed a new extension that allows teach...
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10:50 AM CEST
Simon Walters
This talk will show how Snap! can be used to produce OpenSCAD scripts to produce 3D models.
The project came about as I was experimenting with BeetleBlocks and TinkerCAD Codeblocks to produce parametric models - specifically the gridFinity storage bins.
However, I couldn't come up with an easy method of producing shapes othe...
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11:10 AM CEST
Xavier Pi
The current version of Snap offers two ways to build Microworlds views, one based on iframes and the other based on its own Snap canvas. Microworlds have been used for educational purposes and management. We present the application of Snap!-based Microworlds to illustrate the Industry 4.0 foundations for comprehension purposes using Digital Twins. At the same time, the proposed Microworlds f...
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11:30 AM CEST
Grab a coffee, have a snack, talk to others :)
12:00 PM CEST
Round 3 of lightning talks!
Mary Fries, Sachin Gupta
Quantum Computing is poised to revolutionize computing within the next decade. How can Snap! and the Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum that uses it help inform and prepare high schoolers for this exciting time? Join two UMass Boston physics gradu...
Clifford Anderson
This lightning talk introduces a new programming course on the Coursera platform: Programming for a Networked World. This course teaches the basics of computer programming using NetsBlox, emphasizing remote procedure calls and peer-to-peer networking. T...
Yuan Garcia
(This is a "show your project" submission) Large Language Models are the future, there's no way around that. Companies such as OpenAI and Google have released incredible artificial intelligence models that can do amazing feats, even more incredibly, th...
Mary Fries
Join for a quick rundown of exciting updates across two Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) courses: BJC CSP—An AP Computer Science Principles course for ages 14-18; and BJC Sparks a functions-first course for ages 10-16. We've built a new Computer Scient...
12:25 PM CEST
Richard Millwood
This Birds-of-a-Feather session is to continue to connect existing Turtlestitch enthusiasts in an international community context, sustained by Scratch and Snap conferences over the years and to invite newcomers to discover our mutual interests and pehaps join us. Participants will be invited to share their experiences, projects and new ideas and discuss how Turtlestitch is inspiring learner...
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Genevieve Smith-Nunes
An open collaborative discussion on the use of biometrics and ballet to promote awareness of data ethics among trainee computing secondary teachers. The discussion will begin with a presentation of the methods used, and the results obtained, followed by an exploration of what data ethics means for our current and future computing classrooms.
The very short presentation will describe ...
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John Maloney, Glen Bull
During the past year, new microcontrollers and new software developments have made it easier than ever to interact with the physical world using Snap! This “Birds of a Feather” session will provide opportunities to discuss different techniques and methods that have emerged during the past year, and the different types of projects made possible by these new capabilities.
Ken Kahn
When constructing JavaScript or Python programs (or others), ChatGPT can generate code, help in debugging, read documentation, explain how some code works, and answer questions about the code. AI-assisted programming is likely the future of programming. It is very empowering. See view more
13:00 PM CEST
Kathy Giori, Peter Mathijssen, John Maloney, José García
Many of today's youth were born playing with electronic toys from the time they could hold a rattle. If given the opportunity, they learn to navigate tablets and cellphones easily (before they even go to school). Once children can use a laptop, we want to inspire them to be creators of technology, not just consumers. The goal of this track is to expose the audience to the successful workshop...
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14:00 PM CEST
Grab some lunch!
We have looong lunch breaks not only because we're in the Mediterranean, but also to give space to self-organized sessions.
Lunch break is also when you'll be able to go to the escape room and try out the Snap! Arcade machine.
Roger Olivella
‘Scratch Jr Tactile’ is a new resource designed to include all the students in creative tangible coding experiences. In this talk, you’ll discover the research supporting it and experiences from schools in New York (USA) and Barcelona (Spain).
Intended for students with visual impairment but designed for all the students to play and learn together, ‘Scratch Jr Tactile’ is creating a communit...
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14:45 PM CEST
Get ready to fly onboard spaceship Alonsza23 on mission to Pluto at this year's hybrid escape room experience at the Citilab (or online).
The ship's AI, entirely powered by Snap! and MicroBlocks, has gone rogue because of how untidy the ship is, and is threatening to crash into an asteroid unless we do something about it. Both the onboard (in-person) crew and mission control (online)...
view more
15:30 PM CEST
Get ready to fly onboard spaceship Alonsza23 on mission to Pluto at this year's hybrid escape room experience at the Citilab (or online).
The ship's AI, entirely powered by Snap! and MicroBlocks, has gone rogue because of how untidy the ship is, and is threatening to crash into an asteroid unless we do something about it. Both the onboard (in-person) crew and mission control...
view more
16:00 PM CEST
Dan Garcia, Victoria Phelps, Vedansh Malhotra, Lam Pham
“A’s for All (as time and interest allow)” is an initiative we are evangelizing – part of the larger “Grading for Equity” movement [1] – whose mantra is “fixed learning variable time”. It encourages educators to refactor their courses to allow students as much time as they need to demonstrate proficiency, whether it be multiple-chance exams, or extended deadlines to complete their programmin...
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17:00 PM CEST
Glen Bull, Rachel Gibson, Maketolearn
The Snap! Arcade combines arcade games developed in Snap! with a joystick and arcade controls housed in a physical enclosure. The hardware consists of a single-board computer such as a Raspberry Pi and a microcontroller. The MicroBlocks “Key and Mouse” library developed by Bernat Romagosa was used to communicate with the microcontroller. The basic proof-of-concept format developed has served...
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17:20 PM CEST
Elaine Wolfe, Surferwolf
The ideas for coding in TurtleStitch come from the nature around us. In this multidisciplinary talk, I will explore the science and mathematics of snowflakes and the different methods of coding snowflakes in TurtleStitch.
Here is the slideshow of my presentation on The Beauty of Coding Snowflakes in TurtleStitch
17:40 PM CEST
Michelle Kennedy
Given growing interest in data science education, state and district Computer Science for All efforts are seeking ways to incorporate data science into computer science courses as well as in other courses at the secondary level. In partnership with the New York City Department of Education’s Computer Science Education Team, Education Development Center developed sample data science activitie...
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18:00 PM CEST
Bambi Brewer
Industrial robots are extremely complex, often resulting from the efforts of numerous software and hardware engineers. While these systems seem far removed from programming languages designed for education, block-based languages like Snap! provide highly relevant paradigms for understanding how non-experts can easily and intuitively use robotics systems. This talk will discuss a series of ca...
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19:00 PM CEST
Jadga Hügle
A goodbye message from the conference organizers.
For three days we’ve come back to the Citilab to share our passion, projects and pedagogy around blocks based programming and computing education. It's been a blast getting together at this awesome location in person, where you’ve also been able to participate online.