^{BYOB 3.1 — Build Your Own Blocks (a/k/a SNAP!)}

DOWNLOAD BJC COURSE TUTORIALS SNAP! 4.0 STATUS

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. BYOB 3 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 here that includes a collection of downloadable BYOB blocks contributed by users. Thanks, sparks!

—Jens and Brian

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Privacy Policy
For research purposes, this site uses Google Analytics to collect aggregate information about, e.g., how often the site is used and what links are followed from it. We do not collect personally identifiable information, but if you have a Gmail account or have ever Googled yourself from your own computer, then, despite their assurances to the contrary, Google does collect such information. We recommend that you use AdBlock Plus and/or Privoxy to protect your browsing privacy. (You might also consider the tracking-free DuckDuckGo search engine.)

The Beauty and Joy of Computing course using BYOB/Snap!

Downloads:

Current released version: 3.1.1 (19 May 2011)

Windows installer or files only. (Use "files only" if you're not an Administrator on your computer.)

Macintosh (drag into your Applications folder, or anywhere).

One Laptop Per Child

New: Debian .deb installer courtesy of roijac. Install using GDebi.

For Linux systems, first install Scratch (available in .deb and .rpm installers). Then...

If you used the .rpm: Put the latest BYOB image and these other files in /usr/lib/scratch (should be the same folder that contains Scratch.image). Finally, put this shell script (tweaked as needed) in /usr/bin/byob or anywhere in your path.

If you used the .deb: Put the latest BYOB image in /usr/lib/scratch (should be the same folder that contains Scratch.image). Merge these other files into the subdirectories of /usr/*share/*scratch. Finally, put this shell script (tweaked as needed) in /usr/bin/byob or anywhere in your path.

For variants of Unix other than Linux it's a bit harder; first you should install Squeak, then follow the instructions on the Scratch source code page, then copy the media files from the Windows "files only" link above (all but the .exe and .dll files) into the same directory containing the Scratch image.

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).

Greek translation by Nektarios Moumoutzis.
Esperanto translation by Sebastian Cyprych.
Slovak translation by Peter Štrba.
Slovenian translation by Saša Divjak.
Download these and add them to the locale folder.

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).