Book Description

This book is for students who are already familiar with Snap - its various commands, and its user interface - and basic CS concepts such as, variables, conditional statements, looping, and so on. The book attempts to teach students how to "design" programs through a series of challenging and interesting projects on science simulation, games, puzzles, and math problems.Snap is a powerful language and offers access to lots of advanced ideas of Computer Science some of which are appropriate even for a college-level programming course.The book is organized as a series of independent Snap projects - each of which describes how to design and build an interesting and challenging Snap program. Each project progresses in stages - from a simple implementation to increasingly complex versions. You can take up these projects in any order you like, although I have tried to arrange them in an increasing order of challenge. Programming is a powerful tool that can be applied to virtually any field of human endeavor. The author has tried to maintain a good diversity of applications in this book. You will find the following types of projects: -Arcade games-Puzzle games-Simulations-Math games-Geometric designs-Optical illusions**Learn the concepts through application**As the experts will tell you, concepts are really understood and internalized when you apply them to solve problems. The purpose of this book is to help you apply Snap and CS concepts to solve interesting and challenging programming problems. Every chapter lists, at the very start, the Snap and CS concepts that you will apply while building that project.** Learn the design process **Besides these technical concepts, you will also learn the "divide and conquer" approach of problem-solving. This is a fancy term for the technique of breaking down a bigger problem into many smaller problems and solving them separately one by one.You will learn a bit about a program design technique called "object-oriented thinking". Without going into its gory details such as classes and inheritance, the book tries to show you how you can view each program as a collection of independent objects that cooperate to deliver a coherent experience.You will also learn the "iterative design process" for designing programs. This is another fancy name that describes the idea that something complex can be designed in a repeated idea -> implement -> test cycle, such that in each cycle we add a little more complexity.Finally, you will learn a bit of "project management". Project management helps you undertake a project - such as painting your house, celebrating your sister's birthday, or creating a complex computer program - and complete it in a reasonable time, with reasonable effort, and with reasonable quality. It involves things such as planning tasks, tracking their progress, etc. When you undertake the programming projects in this book, you will learn some of these project management techniques.** Audience for the book **The book is intended for students who are already familiar with Snap. The level of challenge is tuned for high-school students and above, but middle-school students who have picked up all the concepts in an introductory course might also be able to enjoy the projects presented in this book. The book would be a great resource for teachers who teach Snap programming. They could use the projects to teach advanced tricks of programming and to show how complex programs are designed.Finally, the book is for anyone who wants to get the wonderful taste of the entertaining and creative aspect of Computer Programming.** Hardware and software **You can do all your Snap programming work online by creating your own account at http: //snap.berkeley.edu.