This year’s Snap! 9 release represents 10 years since Snap! 4.0 was initially released as a web application. Version 9 includes hundreds of new features, focused on providing students and teachers with new cloud tools, continued development of tools for working with data, and “quality of life” enhancements.

The Snap! cloud has been upgraded to support dedicated student and teacher accounts. Teachers can create accounts on behalf of their students, and manage students in their class. Everyone can also choose to “follow” users and see a feed of new projects shared with the community.

It’s also never been easier to work with data! Snap! 9 adds the ability to treat lists as “dictionaries” (lists of lists can now be indexed by arbitrary alphanumeric values). A number of blocks have been made variadic (i.e., supporting a variable number of inputs), saving the user the tedium of dragging over multiple copies of the same block. These include and, or, all comparison operators, and if, which adds more intermediate else if cases when the right arrow is clicked.

Finally, Parson’s Puzzles can be created with a single click. The Generate Puzzle command generates a microworld with only the blocks present in the selected sprite (and hides the answer behind a menu choice).

In this demo, we’ll share ways that you can use new Snap! features in the classroom, and provide attendees with the tools to build engaging experiences for students.