In this episode, we’re talking to Jens Moenig – he is the co-founder and Lead Programmer of Snap! – a free, visual and educational programming language.
Jens is not just the Lead developer of Snap!, but also a researcher at SAP and a Lawyer – quite an interesting combination 🙂 Together with Brian Harvey from the University of California in Berkeley, he developed this visual programming language.
Snap! is a visual programming language – typically you’d now think of a toy/childish programming language that is very limited in what you can do with it – but Snap! is also used for a serious introduction into programming.
For example, it has been used to teach “The Beauty and Joy of Computing” – an introductory course in computer science at the University of California in Berkeley.
Scratch is another block-based visual programming language that Snap! has been inspired by a lot. Just like Snap!, it is used primarily by kids to create stories, games and animations that can then easily be shared with the community. One of the key differences to Snap! is that Scratch is missing some of the advanced programming concepts, which is why many people advocate to start with Scratch or even Scratch Junior (which targets Kids between 5 and 7 years) and later switch to Snap! for the more advanced features.
Coming back to Snap!, the main site to get started is https://snap.berkeley.edu/ which is where you find the web-based editor and also forums as well as the published Snap! Projects of others
Feature Image: By University of California, Berkeley – https://snap.berkeley.edu/ (Licencing here), AGPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70676447