MeteorPad Tutorial: GoldMine

In a unit on Meteor applications for my web design class, I wrote a series of applications to help my students see the basic structure of a few Meteor applications so that they could eventually design their own. The students had seen applications that tallied votes from a survey, compiled links, and a simple blog. This one was about being competitive, and the students were understandably into it.

This tutorial was designed to use MeteorPad due to some challenges associated with installing Meteor on student computers. The first one involved permissions issues since students are not by default given access to the terminal. The second involved connectivity issues to the Meteor servers from China, which unfortunately, I never fully resolved. MeteorPad offered an awesome balance between ease of making an application and minimizing the need for Terminal. For anyone looking to get started with Meteor, I recommend trying out MeteorPad as it doesn’t require any knowledge of working in the terminal or software installation.

I was able to take data on the students clicking away as I created new pieces of gold and put it out into the field. I’ve written previously about my enthusiasm for collecting data through clicks, so this was another fun source of data.

Code can be downloaded here from Github.