Snap! 7 - Microworlds, Scenes, and Extensions!
Dan Garcia, Michael Ball, Yuan Garcia · Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2 · 2022
Snap! version 7 introduces three big new features: microworlds, scenes, and extensions. Microworlds allow curriculum designers to hide blocks for novice users, allowing them to focus only on the blocks they need. This is similar to Parson's Problems, in which students rearrange commands to solve a challenge. The new version makes it easy for curriculum developers to design these microworlds; we think this can be truly transformative for younger learners. Scenes provide the ability for a single project to have different resources (sprites, sounds, costumes) that would normally have been cluttered in the same "namespace", but now can be nicely organized into different scenes. The last addition may be the most exciting - extensions allow the many Snap! forks now to be brought back in under the primary Snap! umbrella. To make that work, we have exposed low-level JavaScript functionality, and extensions can make use of those functions to adjust the look and feel of Snap! in many ways, provide different tabs or default blocks, and more. Finally, we would like to present some new ways that our teachers say they are using Hyperblocks (vector operations), introduced last year with Snap! 6. Overall, this new release represents more than 18 months of hard work by a dedicated team, and we would be delighted to share these new features with our SIGCSE family.