My SnapCon2021 …

HinweisEine deutsche Fassung dieses Berichts findet sich auf meinem konzeptblog unter Meine SnapCon21 …
My observations and notes to the Snap! Conference 2021 while the impressions are still fresh..
Yesterday the 3rd international meeting of the Snap! community came to an end, which now took place online for the 2nd time. With my mobility restrictions, this was very convenient for me at the moment. The small but very creative and active community met to exchange experiences and present new projects and developments. The mixture of keynotes, workshops (yes, that also works online), short contributions (5 minutes) and lectures (20 minutes) was again very instructive and profitable for me. Even social events (with lively participation) took place. The organisation was exemplary, there was a real conference atmosphere (Mags Amond summarised this very well in a Twitter-thread).

Two of the projects presented were dedicated to my main topic of art and coding. The PH Heidelberg offers the course Kunst durch Coding mit Snap! – Teil I & II (Art through Coding with Snap!). It is very low-threshold, with videos, exercises and tests. It is currently only available in German. Glen Bull presented the course Creating Art, Animations, and Music through Coding (the book accompanying the course is available for dwnload). It’s interesting that the chapters are each based on the work of well-known artists and their recoding with Snap! I will have to take these suggestions into account for my current attempt at a teaching unit on coding art.

Snap! is aimed at a diverse audience: learners and teachers, pupils and students, developers and users. For the different requirements, it is quite helpful that there are now many libraries for Snap! that provide the necessary functionalities for specific areas. Two new ones were introduced, SciSnap! by Eckart Modrow and Crayons & Color by Brian Harvey. However, the palettes of Snap!
palettes can become quite confusing (the screenshot shows about 2/3 of this extension). I hope that the new functions from v. 7 onwards for personalisation (showing/hiding blocks/palettes) will offer enough flexibility to cope with this diversity. Netblox, on the other hand, gets by with very few powerful extensions, with which a whole range of very different distributed data processing applications can then be integrated into Snap!

A special focus with many contributions was the direct integration of microcontrollers in Snap!. If you are interested in the variety, you should definitely have a look at the corresponding recordings! As soon as all this will be available as libraries in V. 7, I will hopefully be able to implement some ideas for interactive installations that have been lying around for a while.

Now I just have to find the time to process the many suggestions, test out the new functions and tools and then optimise my projects and start new ones.

From Media Computation to Data Science

Hinweis: Eine deutsche Fassung dieses Berichts findet sich auf meinem konzeptblog.Over the years I have participated in several MOOCs and webinars. Most of the time, I did not take advantage of all the offers within the events. As I was usually only interested in selected content, I did not obtain a certificate at any of the courses. This time it was different. At the course From Media Computation to Data Science I have now acquired a certificate for the first time, here an openSAP certificate On the one hand, I finished the course completely, because programming with Snap! has accompanied me for several years in my work on the recoding & remixing of Digital Art. On the other hand I always had the feeling that I was only scratching the surface of the „true“ possibilities of Snap! So the course offered the chance to expand this basic knowledge with advanced concepts. Weiterlesen

Visuelles Programmieren

Weil ich mich gerade intensiver mit der visuellen Programmierumgebung Snap! befasse (vgl. Künstliche Kunst), war ich sehr gespannt auf das LOG IN-Themenheft Visuelles Programmmieren. Konkret gibt es dazu sechs Artikel, so den Beginn einer Serie zum objektorientierten Programmieren mit SQUEAK/SMALLTALK (obwohl das momentan schon eher wieder ein Dasein am Rande fristet) von Rüdeger Baumann, die grafische Programmierung von Robotern mit GRAPE und AtoCC zur Erstellung von Zustandsübergangstabellen für die Simulation von Automaten. Für mich sind interessenbedingt die beiden Artikel von Eckart Modrow zu Snap! am ergiebigsten. Was fehlt, sind Einschätzungen und Beispiele zu den spannenden Entwicklungen rund um Scratch, App Inventor, Blockly, BeetleBlocks und und und … Da wäre in einem Doppelheft mehr zum Themenschwerpunkt nötig und möglich gewesen.
rosette Weiterlesen