I am fortunate to have a large panel display connected to my laptop in the classroom. It's a new asset, this year. It allows me to use Snap! to illustrate as I might use a whiteboard. Today, with premeditation, I used Snap! to lead a post-lab discussion where in the past I would have been drawing on my whiteboard. Instead, I explained to students my goal to illustrate the lab results for all eight groups in the class. Relying on their basic understanding of Snap! I engaged the class in dialog to create a sprite that would get stamped repeatedly after moving a specified amount of pixels horizontally to recreate the pattern of position markers they had placed along side of their Lego EV3 robots moving at a constant velocity, last Friday.
I used one group's observed displacement in this first sprite, and in moments had the pattern we sought on the display. I then duplicated this modest string of blocks seven times and made a couple of changes in each to serve as scripts for the other seven sprites I would create with seven simple clicks. Then, just minutes after proposing the goal to illustrate the results for all the groups, we had our product: The display of the position-marker patterns for each of the eight groups.
Is this a big deal? It is to me. These ten minutes were packed with value. Students were reconnected with their data from Friday. Students were seeing the value of the duplication feature in Snap! They were helping direct the illustration. They were watching (and helping!) somebody use Snap! to in a deliberate, yet simple manner to generate a useful product. It was an efficient post-lab discussion as well as a lesson in using Snap! If it was just me and the whiteboard, it would have taken me twice as long to make my couple of points, and I would have lost the attention of many students.
Bonus: I had students identify a glitch in the initial result before me. I had a clear block in each sprite where only one clear block was needed. Multiple clear blocks caused unintended clearing of the display and corrupted the expected pattern.
For those keenly interested, here is a video I created as practice and which I sent to absent students.