SNAP! programming with primary school students

We showed around 120 primary school students today how to code your own computer game, using Snap! These are 1st-4th graders with great minds and it was a real pleasure to experience their curiosity, eagerness to learn and their open minds. There is great hope for the future with children like these.

Snap! (formerly BYOB) is a visual, drag-and-drop programming language. It is an extended reimplementation of Scratch (a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab) that allows you to Build Your Own Blocks. Snap! runs in your browser. It is implemented using Javascript, which is designed to limit the ability of browser-based software to affect your computer, so it’s safe to run even other people’s projects, even if you don’t trust our competence or good intentions.

Snap! is presented by the University of California at Berkeley. It was developed by Jens Mönig at MioSoft Corporation (now at SAP), with design input and documentation by Brian Harvey at Berkeley, and contributions by students at Berkeley and elsewhere.

Anyone can code, anyone can learn it so get into it on http://snap.berkeley.edu/init.

The day today was a parent initiative, with great help from a supporting school eager to learn too, SAP Young Thinkers who taught us as parents to teach the kids - and we started a movement to support children in how to learn computer science and coding, and especially happy to see that in this age both girls and boys are approaching this with open minds. When we continue to support the education, we will hopefully also meet many of these girls in future IT jobs, bringing diversity into coding.

Today, I am a proud mother, a proud employee of SAP and a proud citizent of the future world.

To quote the feedback from the kids: "It was most fun today at Science Day to program with SAP" :-)