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December « 2009 « Marc’s Musings

Monthly Archive for December, 2009

Why educational software

Published on December 17, 2009 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

Here’s one reason why I’m in the educational software business.  We’re pilot-testing one of our new products (called Fraction Nation) at a local school.  The teacher gave all the kids surveys to fill out, there were a lot of great responses.  This response made my day.

Do you enjoy playing Fraction Nation?

I don’t enjoy playing Fraction Nation.  I Love it!  Very Inspiring!  You guys probably change my life and others!  Wonderful Job!

Or this one from another kid…

If you could change something about the program, what would you change?

The thing I would change would be nothing ’cause I really liked it!

Another kid, same question:

If I were to change something, I would change the background.

Oddly enough, several kids said the background thing.  I say if the background is the biggest thing they want to change, that’s a big win.

Universally in that class, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.  Making a product that teaches fractions that kids like isn’t very easy to do, but I think we might have nailed this one.

And here’s a doodle one of them made on the back of a survey for us.

The thing that really scares me is almost every one of these kids has better handwriting than I do now.

ObjectHandles – Multiple Selection and Decorators

Published on December 6, 2009 in Uncategorized. 7 Comments

I’ve been playing around with a few things in ObjectHandles today. The first is multiple-selection. Last week Vlad Janvarev sent me a patch that got it working for non-rotated objects. I put that in, and spent most of my day today figuring out how to extend it to rotated objects as well (dealing with 3 coordinate spaces at once makes my head hurt!). To try it, press the shift key and select multiple objects on the screen, then you can move, rotate or resize them as a whole.
[kml_flashembed fversion="10.0.0" movie="http://rogue-development.com/uploads/ohv2/ObjectHandles2Example.swf" targetclass="flashmovie" publishmethod="static" width="720" height="600" fvars="undefined"]Get Adobe Flash player

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View-Source is enabled in it.

It’s not working 100%, and I’m not sure why. If anyone has any ideas, let me know. The broken part is if you rotate 2 objects, then select them both, then resize them really small. At some point they sometimes start getting bigger instead of smaller depending on the rotation. I’m baffled.

The second thing I played with is the idea of “Decorators” that can draw interesting info based on the state of the set of objects either being moved or currently selected. There’s a quick screenshot of a sample one I did below.

This is also in the link above under “Example 8″. This is just a proof of concept for now. If you want to try it, do it before trying the multi-select since the multi-select can leave objects on fractional pixel boundries which won’t line up perfectly.

Neither of these is ready for prime-time yet. The multi-select stuff is creating tons and tons of temporary objects so the GC kicks in periodically freezing the interface. That’ll need a little optimization.