The Snap!Shot conference this weekend caused me to reflect on the range and diversity of communities inspired by Snap! For example, the TurtleStitch community originated from Snap! and is now a thriving group interested in embroidery patterns and textiles. I don't currently use an embroidery machine, but sometimes drop into their meetings because the conversations are so fascinating. The Snap4Arduino is another large and diverse community of makers that uses Snap! with microcontrollers. We use this tool extensively in all of our maker classes.
Traditionally when a fairy grants three wishes, the third wish is always for three more wishes. When Paul Graham created a startup to create other startups, he called it "Y Combinator" because this function can define recursive functions. In that sense, Snap! might be described as the "Y Combinator" of programming languages, giving rise to other extensions built on the foundation of Snap! or inspired by it.
This caused me to wonder about other Snap! extensions with associated communities. Here is the start of a list with the two examples that I mentioned and additional ones suggested by WWW and @dardoro:
TurtleStitch lets you generate patterns for embroidery machines.
Snap4Arduino is a Snap! extension for microcontrollers.
BeetleBlocks is a complete Snap! modification for 3D design and fabrication.
@warped_wart_wars I was not previously aware of Beetle Blocks. Thanks for directing me to it.
TurtleStitch
Snap4Arduino
BeetleBlocks
It seems likely that several of the Snap! libraries may also have interesting stories behind them. For example, how did the Hummingbird extension evolve? Who did the World Maps extension and is there a community that has formed around it?
@dardoro Thanks! Per WWW's suggestion, I am adding suggested examples to the main post.
Extensions that have developed significant user communities are particularly interesting. Does anyone participating in an active community associated with a Snap! extension have information about this that they could share?
Actually, it's two words, as you can see in our home page
BTW, Beetle Blocks hasn't seen much love for the past 2 or 3 years, but we still have a whole bunch of active users and a handful of schools are using it in class.
@bromagosa I didn't realize that TurtleStitch was based on Beetle Blocks. Can you describe how one led to the other? It sounds like an interesting story.
@jens Elizabeth Langran, the current president of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE), focuses on Geospatial technologies in her educational work:
TurtleStitch is not based on Beetle Blocks, but their cloud and community site are based on ours
I wrote the Beetle Cloud for Beetle Blocks before Snap! had a community site, because we really wanted to have a website where people could publish and browse through projects, and the Snap! backend that we had back then didn't provide these features.
TurtleStitch also needed a community site, so they used the Beetle Cloud as a basis for theirs.
A couple of years later, I got commissioned to build the new Snap! cloud and community site, and based my design on the Beetle Cloud, although it currently differs a lot from that initial design.
