BYOB (old version) downloads

Welcome to the distribution center for BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks), an advanced offshoot of Scratch, a visual programming language primarily for kids from the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. This version, developed by Jens Mönig with design input and documentation from Brian Harvey, is an attempt to extend the brilliant accessibility of Scratch to somewhat older users—in particular, non-CS-major computer science students—without becoming inaccessible to its original audience. BYOB3 adds first class lists, sprites, and procedures to BYOB’s original contribution of custom blocks and recursion.

Also check out Panther, another great advanced spinoff of Scratch with a somewhat different point of view. Panther team member sparks has created a Blocks Library which includes a collection of downloadable BYOB blocks contributed by users. Thanks, sparks!

Jens and Brian

Current version: 3.1.1 (19 May 2011)

Please see release notes about localization to other languages, about the debugger, and about the screensaver (included in file README-BYOB.txt in the distribution).

If you have already installed BYOB 3.1, you can just download these files and replace the ones in your BYOB 3.1 folder with them.

Or if you want to see what it’s all about first, download just the manual (PDF) (included in packages).

Translations

Download these and add them to the locale folder.

Other work

Other people’s work building on BYOB/Snap!:

Propaganda

Note: Everything beyond this point needs minor updating to match the latest version of the software. Coming soon!

BYOB3 tutorials

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Tutorial 1: Building Tool Blocks

as Scratch project and as QuickTime movie

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Tutorial 2: Lists & Higher Order Functions

as Scratch project and as QuickTime movie

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Tutorial 3: Recursion

as Scratch project and as QuickTime movie

Functional programming exercises

Sample projects (included in distribution):

User-contributed resources