[fernirello]

Hey, thanks for the pointers. Question: are you aware of any materials I can follow to teach kids how to program using Snap!? Snap! has indeed become quite powerful with time, but I struggle to come up with a lesson plan, examples, exercises... whatever will gradually bring kids up to a Scheme-like level of expressiveness and generality.

[DonHopkins]

Definitely! To start with: Brian Harvey's magnum opus, "The Beauty and Joy of Computing", which was used for CS10 at Berkeley, and is "intended for non-CS majors at the high school junior through undergraduate freshman level".

https://snap.berkeley.edu/bjc

The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is an introductory computer science curriculum using Snap!, developed at the University of California, Berkeley and Education Development Center, Inc., intended for non-CS majors at the high school junior through undergraduate freshman level. It is a College Board-endorsed AP CS Principles course. It is offered as CS10 at Berkeley.

The curriculum BJC is available online at https://bjc.edc.org

Resources: You can find information about BJC, teacher preparation, and additional resources at https://bjc.berkeley.edu

And here is the Snap! reference manual:

https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/help/SnapManual.pdf

I’ve evangelized about Snap! frequently on Hacker News over the years, and these links have more details and links to other Snap! extensions and projects (of which there are many amazing ones):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594403

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23053999

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24782152

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396842

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397375

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755852

You can discover more of the things people are doing with Snap! in the Snap!Con2023 conference schedule:

https://www.snapcon.org/conferences/2023/schedule/events

And also the videos of the conference talk and other Snap! presentations:

https://www.youtube.com/@SnapCloud/videos

The embedded programming, iot, robotics, embroidery (TurtleStitch), and other tangible computing projects are especially engaging and inspirational for kids.

[fernirello]

Much obliged for your help. Logo has the advantage of being immediately applicable to much younger learners (~7) than BJC (~16). There's a big mass of teaching resources (microworlds, etc) that are immediately usable at the beginning, with the possibility of progressing into more complex concepts (e.g., turtle geometry). Maybe, for small children, it'd be a matter of buckling down to port Logo examples to Snap!'s turtle graphics... I may try that.