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forteachers.html
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<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>SNAP! (Build Your Own Blocks)</title>
<meta name="description" content="About Us">
<meta name="author" content="Kyle Hotchkiss">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/styles.css">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="images/Alonzo-favicon.ico">
<script type='text/javascript', scr='https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js'></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="menu">
<div id="menuitems">
<ul style="width: 734px; float: right">
<li><a href="https://snap.berkeley.edu/run" target="_blank">Run</a></li>
<li><a href="extensions.html">Extensions</a></li>
<li><a href="about.html">About Snap!</a></li>
</ul>
<ul style="width: 116px">
<li style="float: left; height: 42px; width: 116px"><a class ='logo' href="index.html" style="top: 0px; height: 16px; width: 66px"><img src="images/snaplogo.png" alt="Snap!" style="margin-top: -10px; height: 35px; width: auto;"></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<h1>For Teachers</h1>
<h2><a href="https://bjc.berkeley.edu">The Beauty and Joy of Computing</a></h2>
<h2>Snap! was created to help teach computer science at a level between Scratch (aimed at 8-14 year olds) and university computer science majors -- that is, high school students and non-CS-major college students, ages 14-20.</h2>
<h2>In particular, Snap! is the programming language of the <a href="https://bjc.berkeley.edu">The Beauty and Joy of Computing</a> developed at Berkeley for non-CS majors and for high schools.</h2>
<h2>Teenagers love computers! They love their cell phones; they love video games; they love social networking. And yet computer <i>programming</i> has had a bad reputation as a lonely occupation for nerds -- almost all of whom are male, and white or Asian.</h2>
<h2>We are part of a national movement to change this situation by creating computer science curricula for non-specialists, in which computer science is connected to the applications that matter to students, and to the social implications of computing in general.</h2>
<h2>Still, we want to do this without losing the computer science. There are a lot of computer-related jobs that don't require CS education. Web page design, data mining, accounting, digital media: for all of these, there is software available for non-programmers. But we're not satisfied if we get kids to love computing without really engaging with the skill that's at the heart of CS: programming.</h2>
<h2>We wanted a programming language that would be non-intimidating, would instantly attract non-programmers, but that would support the deep ideas of computer science that are included in the BJC curriculum, especially recursion and higher order procedures. The obvious choice for the first part of this goal is <a href="https://scratch.mit.edu">Scratch</a>, from the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. But Scratch, aimed at elementary school-aged kids, deliberately leaves out the tools we need for the big ideas. Then we discovered that Jens Monig, earlier a member of the Scratch Team, had solved the first part of our problem by writing BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks), a Scratch extension that allowed recursion. We worked with Jens on expanding the design to include first class procedures and first class lists, with which we could program everything else we needed in BYOB itself.</h2>
<h2>Snap! is a complete rewrite, much faster and more stable, and browser-based because high school teachers told us they weren't allowed to install software on the school network. We (reluctantly) asked Jens to change the name from BYOB because the pun made a few teachers uncomfortable.</h2>
<br>
</body>
</html>