Oh, Snap! Enabling and Encouraging Success in CS1 (Abstract Only)

CS10, is UC Berkeley's CS0 course. Each semester we have between 40% and 50% of our students continue on to CS61A, our CS1 course. Meanwhile an average of 25% more students express interest in continuing learning computer science through other means. CS10 is taught in a visual language called Snap! and CS61A in Python. This poster explores some of the trends we have seen between CS10 and CS61A enrollment, and our new "Besides Blocks" curriculum which helps transition students from a visual to text based language. Besides Block is approximately one fourth of the CS10 curriculum which introduces Python in the context of the Turtle Graphics system, and a tool called Codification which is a way of translating Snap! blocks to Python.