S4A vs Snap?

[Brent Dixon]

Hello! I'm working on a series of lessons and some custom prototyping hardware for a group of elementary schools in the US. I've experimented with both S4A and Snap, and really like both of them. I was wondering if the developers behind the projects had a recommendation for which one, based on the current and future status of each tool, would be the best to build curricula around. 

Considerations include:

• These will be run in classrooms by teachers with limited technical training
• These will be very simple lessons, designed for young children at the 1st - 4th grade level.
• Hoping for the tool with the most active community so the teachers can engage with others in the world experimenting in similar ways.

Thanks for your thoughts!

brent

[Bernat Romagosa]

Hi Brent!

This is actually a hard question to answer, as we're behind both projects so we kinda love them both equally :)

I think the decision has to be yours, but I can of course give you some pros and cons:

S4A: Years of user testing behind, thus much more stable and error proof. Bigger community, which also means more materials and documentation available. However, no advanced programming concepts (no real recursivity, no custom blocks, no lambda, etc), support for just a couple of boards (Uno, Diecimila, Duemilenova and Leonardo) and clunky looking UI. Also, no support from the original project devs, as Scratch 1.4 is deprecated and has been discontinued.

Snap4Arduino: Basically just the opposite! Advanced programming concepts, support for all Arduino boards, modern UI with two different skins, support from the original developers. However, smaller community (although rapidly growing, we're getting code contributions often, and hearing about people using it all over the world) thus almost no teaching materials. Also, still in active development, so you may encounter the occasional bug, which you should report so we can get fixed ;)

I hope I made the decision easier!

Bernat.

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[maprzybylla]

Hi Brent,

I've experimented with both S4A and Snap4Arduino and I personally believe that S4A is better suited for younger children. For some reasons it seems to be a bit more intuitive to the students (I taught 9th graders, 10th graders and teachers), possibly because of the pre-setup of the Arduino pins to their functionality. In Snap you can configure everything yourself - which I love, but which is a lot more complicated for novice learners. I also noticed, that S4A runs a lot better on older machines that are not updated (in my school due to server administration issues). However, several drawbacks in S4A may lead you to snap in the long term. Still, I would recommend starting with S4A, let the kids discover its limitations and then switch to Snap.

Hope this helps!

Mareen

[Brent Dixon]

Very helpful feedback. Thank you!

(Sent with clumsy fingers from some mobile thing.)

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[Bernat Romagosa]

Mareen is one of our earliest adopters and has contributed a lot to the project, having been using it with kids since before it was even usable, so I'd really follow her advice!

Thanks for your input, Mareen! :)

Bernat.

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[studiog...@gmail.com]

Hallo, excuse me for my english.
The choice between S4A and SNAP for edu experiment is a my problem too.
I am agree that S4A is more friendly than SNAP but SNAP in very cool for the "build your block".
But I have not understand if SNAP can go on raspeberry, is it possible?

[Bernat Romagosa]

Hi!

Snap4Arduino can run on a raspberry, _but_ you may experience slow speeds. If you do, please let me know as we're still experimenting with this and I'll try to fix it right away :)

Best,

Bernat.

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[studiog...@gmail.com]

thank you, now i have only used s4a and raspberry, and it is ok, if I'll try to use snap and raspberry I'll ask help !

[Neil Winterburn]

Hi, I am trying to run Snap4Arduino on a raspberry pi, but I can't get the Arduino to connect. I am currently running the s4a.html file on the web browser. It seems to be working fine otherwise, but isn't connecting to the Arduino.
Any advice?
Is there another way to run Snap4Arduino on the Pi?

[Bernat Romagosa]

We're exploring possibilities... I can only say ChromeBooks and RasPi are now a priority for us, and we'll try to allocate time to work on this next month. NWJS is going in a direction that (hopefully) will let us choose a path that works for all systems no matter what platform they're on without having to provide custom compiled binaries for the serial port connection any more.

Sorry about the delay, time's scarce and we're a tiny team!

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[maryammuk...@gmail.com]

Hi Bernat Romagosa,
It's me Maryam Mukhtiar from Pakistan. I want to make software like S4A and Snap4Arduino can you help me how to do it I have cloned source code of Scratch 1.4 into Git Bash and working with Adobe FlashDevelop IDE to do modifications in code. Am I on the right way for doing it? or can you tell me that how to start it? I have read some conversation of you on Gmail group of S4A Please help me by replying as soon as possible.
Thank You in Advance.

[Bernat Romagosa]

Hi Maryam Mukhtiar,

I'm afraid you're not on the right path. Scratch 1.4 is written in Squeak Smalltalk, not Flash, and Snap is written in Javascript. Scratch 2.0 is the one written in Flash.

Hope it helps! :)

Cheers,

Bernat.

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[rashantha]

I have installed both S4A is so much easier to use, but as of late installing on Ubuntu 64 bit is extremely hard. 

We have tried several ways of installing and we have not been successful. Let's hope someone fixes this or post a new guide.