6th graders programmed kaleidoscopes in Snap! Thank you, @paley2!

One awesome kiddo located images of me as costumes for her sprites…

In July, I took a week-long course about the Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum co-sponsored by CSNYC and TEALS. They organized a week of learning for us led by Josh Paley (@paley2). Josh adapts the BJC curriculum to teach computer science to high schoolers and college students. Josh shared numerous projects and examples and teaching strategies. While Snap (out of Berkeley) is super similar to Scratch (out of MIT), I have not seen any evidence that there is any East Coast vs. West Coast turf war. Snap is a BYOB environment (build your own block), which is a pretty powerful modification of Scratch. Here’s a Google Doc full of awesome resources that Josh shared with us: http://tinyurl.com/nycbjcaug2014

I replicated the Kaleidoscope program with 6th graders today, as it was one of the easier projects I did with Josh that just entailed having multiple sprites on the screen. The students and I had a great conversation about sprites, costumes, and rules of reflection about the x-axis and y-axis. Here is a link to the program: http://tinyurl.com/krbkaleidoscope — use the space bar starts the action and the c key clears the screen.

Thank you again to Cindy Gao of CSNYC, Nathaniel Granor of TEALS, and Josh Paley for a great week of inspiration!