DODonHopkins·Jul 21, 2023
You're wildly mischaracterizing and misunderstanding where the people who developed and inspired Snap! are coming from, and what their background and experience in teaching computer science and other subjects to kids and college students really is.
If you'll please take the time to read some of the things they've written, especially the The Beauty and Joy of Computing, and the long history of Scratch and Logo and Scheme that led to and inspired the development of Snap!, you'd probably find that you agree with a lot of things they say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Harvey_(lecturer)
https://bjc.berkeley.edu/team/snap/
https://snap.berkeley.edu/research
https://www.snapcon.org/users/5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_Solomon
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755836
Seymour Papert, introducing "The Turtle":
https://www.youtub
Read the rest
e.com/watch?v=-V_OPfmbbCk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTO-Ruby-Uo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlRGe5QGhs
Also thanks to Lars Brinkhoff's research: Here's a video uploaded by Cynthia Solomon. Seems legit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ
Definitely check out the rest of Cynthia Solomon's youtube video treasure trove, with lots of great stuff by Marvin and Margaret Minsky, Seymour Papert, and others from MIT and Atari Cambridge Research:
https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthiaso/videos
Seymour Papert on Logo, Turtles and Giraffes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maDzjHIiXZc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDyym_9-E-g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha8sTgtUejM
A gestural programming system developed by Margaret Minsky, Danny Hillis, Daniel Huttenlocher, David Wallace (Gumby), and Radia Perlman at the MIT-AI Lab:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6SQTVM9M
Marvin Minsky demonstrating a Logo Machine with an acoustic modem and cassette tape, talking about education theory, and showing a part of his first "thinking" machine: a simulated nerve synapse (1 of 40) with an adjustable knob that he built in 1951 out of WW-II surplus hardware, and discussing playing with Tinker Toys as a child:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S72xF3gd-mI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZRQQl8mA0c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfKRNHRyD64
David Levitt demonstrating his musical improvisation software:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys
List of Logo memos from MIT AI Lab:
https://github.com/pdp11/sits/wiki/List-of-Logo-memos
Brian Harvey’s Personal Narrative on Snap!: Scheme Disguised as Scratch
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3
>In 2009, the University of California, Berkeley, was one of several universities developing a new kind of introductory computer science course, meant for non-CS majors, to include aspects of the social implications of computing along with the programming content. Scratch wasn’t quite expressive enough to support such a course (it lacked the ability to write recursive functions), soProf. Daniel Garcia and I thought “What’s the smallest change we could make to Scratch to make it usable in our course?” After 20 years teaching Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [Abelson et al.1984], the best computer science text ever written, I knew that the answer to “what’s the smallest change” is generally “add lambda.” I joined forces with German programmer Jens Mönig, who had developed BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks), an extension to Scratch with custom (user-defined) blocks, including reporters and predicates. [...]