cooltech

1111 bookmarks
Custom sorting
Alice – Tell Stories. Build Games. Learn to Program.
Alice – Tell Stories. Build Games. Learn to Program.
Alice is an innovative block-based programming environment that makes it easy to create animations, build interactive narratives, or program simple games in 3D. Unlike many of the puzzle-based coding applications Alice motivates learning through creativite exploration. Alice is designed to teach logical and computational thinking skills, fundamental principles of programming and to be a first exposure to object-oriented programming. The Alice Project provides supplemental tools and materials for teaching using Alice across a spectrum of ages and subject matter with proven benefits in engaging and retaining diverse and underserved groups in computer science education.
·alice.org·
Alice – Tell Stories. Build Games. Learn to Program.
MathBox² — Acko.net
MathBox² — Acko.net
How do you convince web developers—heck, people in general—to care about math? This was the challenge underlying Making Things With Maths, a talk I gave three years ago. I didn't know either, I just knew why I liked this stuff: demoscene, games, simulation, physics, VR, … It had little to do with what passed for mathematics in my own engineering education. There we were served only eyesore PowerPoints or handwritten overhead transparencies, with simplified graphs, abstract flowcharts and rote formulas, available on black and white photocopies. Smart people who were supposed to teach us about technology seemed unable to teach us with technology. Fixing this felt like a huge challenge where I'd have to start from scratch. This is why the focus was entirely on showing rather than telling, and why MathBox 1 was born. It's how this stuff looks and feels in my head, and how I got my degree: by translating formulas into mental pictures, which I could replay and reason about on demand.
·acko.net·
MathBox² — Acko.net
4D Toys. An interactive toy for 4D children.
4D Toys. An interactive toy for 4D children.
Poke, throw, roll and watch as they disappear into a dimension you can't see. Get an intuitive feel for how four-dimensional objects behave: Become a child of the fourth dimension. In this case the 4th dimension is not time but a 4th dimension of space that works just like the first three dimensions we are familiar with. If you count time these toys are 5D. It turns out that the rules of how objects bounce, slide and roll around can be generalized to any number of dimensions, and this toy lets you experience what that would look like.
·4dtoys.com·
4D Toys. An interactive toy for 4D children.
Pipes
Pipes
Yahoo Pipes resurrected! You enter data by pointing a block to an URL and an RSS (or Atom) feed. This feed then moves through your pipe, block by block, and each block can manipulate it. A simple example is combining multiple RSS feeds into one and filtering that combined data stream for a keyword.
·pipes.digital·
Pipes
BotOrNot by Truthy
BotOrNot by Truthy
BotOrNot checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot. Higher scores are more bot-like.
·truthy.indiana.edu·
BotOrNot by Truthy
Glitch
Glitch
Glitch is the friendly community where you'll build the app of your dreams With working example apps to remix, a code editor to modify them, instant hosting and deployment - anybody can build a web app on Glitch, for free
·glitch.com·
Glitch
How to connect to a MySQL database with JavaScript
How to connect to a MySQL database with JavaScript
The DreamFactory REST API enables database connections using a wide variety of front end scenarios. This simple sample app demonstrates how DreamFactory 2.0 easily can be used as a backend for a JavaScript application. It's a simple address book, where contacts can be created, shown, updated, deleted and grouped, basically CRUD operations. The Address Book is a very simple one page app based on plain JavaScript and jQuery. All the functions used for DreamFactory 2.0 REST API requests are extended in the file functions.js, and the code examples show how to use them.
·blog.dreamfactory.com·
How to connect to a MySQL database with JavaScript
How to Create Direction-Aware CSS-Only Hover Effects by Gabrielle Wee on CodePen
How to Create Direction-Aware CSS-Only Hover Effects by Gabrielle Wee on CodePen
My design partner and I stumbled across the Kikk Festival homepage back in 2015, which featured these awesome parallax hover cards. We loved the look and wanted to recreate it in a project, but due to the nature of the codebase, wouldn't be able to use Javascript to get it right. Undeterred, I began searching for solutions that were CSS-only, and stumbled across something interesting. One of the most fascinating CSS selectors for me is the ~ tilde, which selects the nearest element that matches the selector and is preceeded by the first. For example, ul ~ p selects the third element in I realized that I could use this to create direction-aware hover effects for virtually anything!
·codepen.io·
How to Create Direction-Aware CSS-Only Hover Effects by Gabrielle Wee on CodePen
Datejs - An open-source JavaScript Date Library
Datejs - An open-source JavaScript Date Library
Datejs is an open-source JavaScript Date Library. Comprehensive, yet simple, stealthy and fast. Datejs has passed all trials and is ready to strike. Datejs doesn’t just parse strings, it slices them cleanly in two.
·datejs.com·
Datejs - An open-source JavaScript Date Library
ImageCodr.org
ImageCodr.org
Flickr hosts millions of images that are licensed under a Creative Commons license or are in the public domain (Flickr Commons). Depending on the license, you may use the images on your private or commercial webpage, or can make changes to it. If you want to use these images, you need to to the following: Make sure you understood the license correctly Get the correct HTML code for the IMG tag Link the image back to the Flickr photo page Give the author of the image proper credits (Attribution) Link to the Flickr profile of the author Link to the license the image is licensed under With ImageCodr.org, there is no need to do all this manually, you simply enter in the URL of the picture page (as seen in your browser) you are interested in and ImageCodr.org will generate the ready to use HTML code. It will also display a brief and easy license summary, so you don't get in legal trouble because you missed something.
·imagecodr.org·
ImageCodr.org
TimeLineCurator
TimeLineCurator
Want to make a visual timeline, but don't have the time to draw one manually? Or maybe you have some documents, but you're not sure if the events they depict form a compelling timeline? TimeLineCurator quickly and automatically extracts temporal references in freeform text to generate a visual timeline. You can then interactively curate the events in this timeline until you are satisfied, or quickly decide that there is no interesting temporal structure within the document. You can also create a mashup of multiple documents against each other to compare their temporal structure. Already using TimelineJS? TimeLineCurator works with TimelineJS: instead of tediously assembling your timeline in a spreadsheet, TimeLineCurator allows you to curate your timeline visually. When you are ready, you can export your curated timeline to a TimelineJS widget that you can embed on your website or blog.
·cs.ubc.ca·
TimeLineCurator
ReadUps
ReadUps
A ReadUp is a social reading experience. Think of it as meeting up inside a book. ReadUps offers a web-based reading system that works on tablets and laptops. With it, you invite friends to read with you for a limited amount of time. In addition, you can share comments on any paragraph, or message the other readers in real time. All you need to do is give people the URL for your ReadUp and you're good to go! To slap a password on the ReadUp (so only the people you share the password with can get in), buy a $5 upgrade. When the allotted time runs out, the ReadUp disappears.
·readups.com·
ReadUps