Snap is a little intimidating compared to Scratch.
It's clearly designed for older students, but at that point some of the advantages of blocks are lost.
Most of these systems suffer from the 'canvas' model, where you have many stacks of blocks scattered around the canvas as they are created, possibly in no particular or logical order. It's difficult to find things or to get a good overview, and really becomes a navigation problem as projects get bigger. I think they would greatly benefit from a more traditional ide/file type structure, or some other way to structure 'stacks'.
In Snap! version 12 they have added the ability to create tutorials, which are projects that load up with a limited set of blocks (you choose what set is available when creating the tutorial). This fixes the intimidation problem: you can even create a set of tutorials that, if the student goes through them in the recommended order, teaches the basics with just four or five blocks available at first, then slowly introduces concepts over time.
What if you spent 10 years building a business abroad?
I remember early in my career being send by my employer on 'contract' assignments to other companies for 3 or 6 months. When I left that company and went interviewing, everyone was extremely concerned that I had been an independent contractor, some even saying they never employed such people. As though, once you've broken the chains, you're no longer employable.
This is great. I'm learning Rust myself and your son's article contributed to my knowledge.
I'm also very impressed by part 2. I have my own lisp but I haven't managed to implement a compiler or code generation yet. Really enjoyed reading about the hashmap too. The textbook solution to collisions is probing and comparison. It never occurred to me that I could just resize the underlying array until the collisions disappear altogether.
No, this device was only discontinued this year, you can still buy accessories and it still receives software updates.
It just turns out their software has flaws that break the update process after a few years of sitting unused. Not great, but luckily there are workarounds, as this article walks you through.
LOL - agreed. I was a bit shocked by the title being the type that gets bonded with my devices. I still use my Windows laptop from 2017 and my M1 Macbook Pro from 2021 daily. Additionally, my Kindles are from 2010.
Where is is obsolete? It's still receiving software updates and likely to for at least 3-4 years. Even after that it's not going to magically brick itself
I don’t understand what pot of money this is coming out of. Has Congress authorized taxpayer money be used for paying energy companies to halt projects?
It's clearly designed for older students, but at that point some of the advantages of blocks are lost.
Most of these systems suffer from the 'canvas' model, where you have many stacks of blocks scattered around the canvas as they are created, possibly in no particular or logical order. It's difficult to find things or to get a good overview, and really becomes a navigation problem as projects get bigger. I think they would greatly benefit from a more traditional ide/file type structure, or some other way to structure 'stacks'.
reply