programming

Making Groups – A Genetic Algorithm Experiment

I’ve wanted to experiment with genetic algorithms for a long time, but never quite found the time to make it happen. I guess part of it was that I never believed the algorithm would work and find what I wanted. I decided recently to pick this project back up after a long time (with some prodding from good people) and actually make it work. I think the major push came when I realized that I wanted the ability to make mixed groups, or homogeneous groups, and balance gender, and prevent certain students from being together. Was I over-constraining? Was the possibility that I was over-constraining keeping me from even trying to do this in the first place?

Thus, I decided to actually make this happen. I also decided I wanted to make it look much nicer than the Python version I’ve been using now for over four years.

You can see the code directly here at CodePen, or play with it below.

[codepen_embed height=”265″ theme_id=”0″ slug_hash=”rmebEQ” default_tab=”js,result” user=”emwdx”]See the Pen GroupMaker by Evan Weinberg (@emwdx) on CodePen.[/codepen_embed]

The basic algorithm is this:

Fill in a list of students with names, genders, skill levels, and an optional list of names with whom a given student should not be grouped. Line 2
Generate a bunch of random groups of students with these properties. For each group, calculate a series of metrics that the fitness of a given group. Lines 45-156
Calculate the score of a grouping, which consists of a full set of groups that contain all of the students of the class. Line 200
Generate a bunch of groupings, sort them according to score. Take the top 10 groups, and make swaps of students between groups to make a long list of groups. (This is lines 214-224.) This is the mutation step of the genetic algorithm. Sort them again according to score.
Repeat for a few generations, then take the top group.

It’s pretty fascinating to watch it work. I made the scoring step uniform for gender by tweaking the coefficients in Line 200. You could also make this score value gender balance, a range of abilities, or anything else.

This is screaming for a nicer UI, which I have in the works. For now, it’s out there in its fairly un-commented state. If you want to hack this to use with your own students, you’ll want to tweak the student list in Line 2, the numbers of groups of each size (groups of 1, groups of 2, groups of 3, and so on) in Line 242, and possibly the values I use in the score generation line in line 200.

Holiday Travel and Exporting PearDeck Data to Desmos

One of the unique phenomena of international schools is the reality that, during a vacation, the school population disperses to locations across the world. I had students do an end of semester reflection through PearDeck, and one of the slides asked students to drag a dot to where they were going to spend the vacation.

PearDeck allowed me to see the individual classes and share these with the students one at a time. I wanted to create a composite of all of the classes together in Desmos to share upon our return to classes, which happens tomorrow. You can find the result of this effort below. This is the combined data for draggable slides from five different sessions of the same deck.

The process of creating this image was a bit of work to figure out, but in the end wasn’t too hard to pull off. Here’s how I did it.

The export function of a completed PearDeck session, among other things, gives the coordinates of each student’s dragged dot in a Draggable slide. I could not use these coordinates as is, as graphing them on top of the map image in Desmos did not actually yield the correct locations. I guessed that these coordinates represented a percentage of the width of the image used for the Draggable background since the images people upload are likely all of different sizes. I did a brief search in the documentation, and couldn’t find official confirmation, but I’m fairly sure this is the case. An additional complication for using these is that the origin is at the upper left hand corner, which is typical for programming pixel art, but not correct for use with a Cartesian system as in Desmos.

This means that an exported data point located at 40, 70 is at 40% of the width of the image, and 70% of the height of the image, measured from the top left corner.

Luckily, Desmos makes it pretty easy to apply a transformation to the data to make it graph correctly. I took all of the data from the PearDeck export, pasted it into a spreadsheet class by class, and then pasted the aggregate data into a Desmos table. Desmos appears to have a 50 point limitation for pasting data this way, which is why the Desmos link below has two separate tables.

Click here to see the graph and data on Desmos

If there’s an easier way to do this, I’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments.

Hacking the 100-point Scale – Part 4: Playing with Neural Networks

First, a review of where we’ve been in the series:

The 100 point scale suffers from issues related to its historical use and difficulties of communicating what it means.
It might be beneficial to have a solid link between the 100 point scale (since it likely isn’t going anywhere) and the idea of achievement levels. This does not need to be rigidly defined as 90 – 100 = A, 80-89 = B, and so on.
I asked for you to help me collect some data. I gave you a made up rubric with three categories, and three descriptors for each, and asked you to categorize these as achievement levels 1 – 4. Thank you to everyone who participated!

This brings us to today’s post, where I try to bring these ideas together.

In case you only have time for a quick overview, here’s the tl;dr:

I fed the rubric scores you all sent me after the previous post to train a neural network. I then used that neural network to grade all possible rubric scores and generate achievement levels of 1, 2, 3, or 4.

Scroll down to the image to see the results.

Now to the meat of the matter.

Rubric design is not easy. It takes quite a bit of careful thought to decide on descriptors, point values and much of the time we don’t have a team of experts on the payroll to do this for us.

On the other hand, we’re asked to make judgements on students all the time. These judgements are difficult and subjective at times. Mathematical tools like averages help reduce the workload, but they do this at the expense of reducing the information available.

The data you all gave me was the result of educational judgment, and that judgement comes from what you prioritize. In the final step of my Desmos activity, I asked what you typically use to relate a rubric score to a numerical grade. Here are some of the responses.

From @aknauft:

I need to see a consistent pattern of top rubric scores before I assign the top numerical grade. Similarly, if the student does *not* have a consistent set of low rubric scores, I will *not* give them the low numerical grade.
Here specifically, I was looking for:
3 scores of 1 –> skill level 1
2 scores of 2 or 1 score of 3 –> skill level 2 or more
2 scores of 3 –> skill level 3 or more
3 scores of 3 –> skill level 4

From Will:

Sum ‘points’
3 or 4 points= 1
5 or 6 points = 2
7 points= 3
8 or 9 points = 4

From Clara:

1 is 60-70
2 is 70-80
3 is 80-90
4 is 90-100
However, 4 is not achievable based on your image.
Also to finely split each point into 10 gradients feels too subjective.
Equivalency to 100 (proportion) would leave everyone except those scoring 3 on the 4 or scale, failing.

Participant Paul also shared some helpful percentages that directly relate the 1 – 4 scale to percentages, perhaps off of his school’s grading policy. I’d love to know more. Dennis (on the previous post) commented that multi-component analysis should be done to set the relative weights of the different categories. I agree with his point that this is important and that it can easily be done in a spreadsheet. The difficulty is setting the weights.

The experience of assigning grades using percentages is a time saver, and is easy because of its historical use. Generating the scales as the contributors above did is helpful for relating how a student did on a task to their level. My suggestion is that the percentages we use for achievement levels should be an output of the rubric design process, not an input. In other words, we’ve got it all backwards.

I used the data you all gave me and fed it into a neural network. This is a way of teaching a computer to make decisions based on a set of example data. I wanted the network to understand how you all thought a particular set of rubric scores would relate to achievement level, and then see how the network would then score a different set of rubric scores.

Based solely on the six example grades I asked you to give, here are the achievement levels the neural network spit out:

I was impressed with how the network scored with the twenty one (out of 27 possible permutations) that you didn’t score. It might not be perfect, and you might not agree with every one. The amazing part of this process, however, is that any results you disagree with could be tagged with the score you prefer, and then the network could retrain on that additional training data. You (or a department of teachers) could go through this process and train your own rubric fairly quickly.

I was also curious about the sums of the scores that led to a given achievement level. This is after all what we usually do with these rubrics and record in the grade book. I graphed the rounded results in Desmos. Achievement level is on the vertical axis, and sum is on the horizontal.

One thing that struck me is the fuzziness around certain sum values. A score of 6, for example, leads to a 1, 2, or a 3. I thought there might be some clear sum values that might serve as good thresholds for the different levels, but this isn’t the case. This means that simply taking the percentage of points earned and scaling into the ten point ranges for A, B, C, and D removes some important information about what a student actually did on the rubric.

A better way to translate these rubric scores might be to simply give numerical grades that indicate the levels, and communicate the levels that way as part of the score in the grade book. “A score of 75 indicates the student was a level 2.”

Where do we go from here? I’m not sure. I’m not advocating that a computer do our grading for us. Along the lines of many of my posts here, I think the computer can help alleviate some of the busy work and increase our efficiency. We’re the ones saying what’s important. I did another data set where I went through the same process, but acted like the third category was less important than the other two. Here’s the result of using that modified training data:

It’s interesting how this changed the results, but I haven’t dug into them very deeply.

I just know that something needs to change. I had students come to me after final exam grades were put in last week (which, by the way, were raw percentage grades) and being confused by what their grades meant. The floor for failing grades is a 50, and some students interpreted this to mean that they started with a 50, and then any additional points they earned were added on to that grade. I use the 50 as a floor, meaning that a 30% raw score is listed as a 50% in the final exam grade. We need to improve our communication, and there’s a lot of work to do if the scale isn’t going away.

I’m interested in the idea of a page that would let you train any rubric of any size through a series of clicks. What thoughts do you have at the end of this exploration?

Technical Details:

I used the Javascript implementation of a neural network here to do the training. The visualizations were all made using the Raphael JS library.

Hosting Meteor JS Applications – My Process on Webfaction

There has been some interest expressed here and on Twitter for a description of the process of moving an application from the free meteor.com to my own server. I run my web applications (such as this blog) on Webfaction, which gives a lot of flexibility for setting up a number of different hosted services. I won’t say each step below is easy and as straightforward as it sounds, so feel free to add your difficulties to the comments below, and I’ll elaborate. Having the steps in one place will hopefully be as useful for you as it likely will be for me.

Note: Steps 1 – 3 in the list below are just for downloading data you may have collected in an online application onto your computer. If you don’t care about the online data, you can skip down to step 4.

I installed Mongo on my local machine from http://www.mongo.org
In a terminal on my local machine, I entered meteor mongo --url my-app.meteor.com to get the username, password, url, port, and database name from the *.meteor.com website. The result is a URL that contains the information you will need for the next step: (username:password@url:port/databasename)
save the data onto my local computer using mongodump --host hostname:port --db databasename -u username -p password -o ~/Desktop where the information from the last step replaces the username, password, etc.
To create a packaged version of the app that runs on my computer, go to the Meteor project directory, and type meteor build --architecture os.linux.x86_64 ./ . This assumes that the server that will be running your project is a Linux machine…but this assumption is probably a good one for most hosting services.
Create a free account on mLab (http://www.mlab.com). The free account gives you 500 MB of space for databases. For comparison, the total size of my most-used application is only 2.7 MB. I think you’ll have enough space. The important thing to get, once you have a database set up, is called the URI. If you create a database, there is a box at the top of the page that gives you information that looks like this: mongodb://:@dsXXXXXXX.mlab.com:PORT/DATABASENAME which you will need in the next step.
I learned the Webfaction specific steps from reading this page, though you won’t need to do the Mongo steps if you are using mLab as I am. On the Webfaction server, you must install node. You can do this by following the steps here. You must also create a custom WebSockets application. This will give you a port number that you will need in the step below where local variables are set.
Again, this is a Webfaction specific instruction, but you need to attach the application to a domain/URL where your application will be accessed. Save this URL
Once you have created the WebSockets app, upload the .tar file (from step 4) to the /webapps/web-sockets-application directory through ftp and unpack with tar -xzf my-app.tar.gz
Using the mLab information from step 5, the port number from step 6, and the location of the node application from step 6, you’ll need to fill in the appropriate parts of the commands below:

export MONGO_URL="mongodb://:@dsXXXXXXX.mlab.com:PORT/DATABASENAME?autoReconnect=true" # 2
export MAIL_URL='email-address-for-sending-mail-from-your-app'
export PORT="PORT-NUMBER-FROM-STEP-6"
export ROOT_URL="DOMAIN-FOR-APPLICATION-FROM-STEP-7"
export PATH=~/webapps/node/bin/:$PATH
Almost there, folks. Inside the unpacked .tar directory (which will be called /bundle), enter the /bundle/programs/server/packages directory and run npm install
Go back to the /bundle directory and run nohup node main.js . This terminal command will run a command continuously on the shell, even if you close the terminal.
If you’ve made it this far, you might just have your Meteor app running on your own server.

I hope this helps you, but if you run into trouble, throw a comment below and I’ll see if I can help.

My Journey with Meteor as a Teacher-Coder

Many of you may know about my love for Meteor, the Javascript framework that I’ve used for a number of projects in and around the classroom. I received an email this morning alerting me (and the many other users) that the free hosting service they have generously offered since inception would be shutting down over the next month.

To be honest, I’m cool with this decision. I think it’s important to explain why and express my appreciation for having access to the tool for as long as I have.

I started writing programs to use in my classroom in earnest in 2012. Most of these tended to be pretty hacky – a simple group generator and a program to randomly generate practice questions on geometric transformations were among these early ones. The real power I saw for these was the ability to collect, store, and filter information that would be useful for teaching so that I could focus my time on using that information to decide on the next steps for my students. I took a Udacity course on programming self-driving cars and on web applications and loved what I learned. I learned to use some Python to take some of the programs I had written early on and run them within web pages. I built some nifty online activities inspired by the style of Dan Meyer and put them out for others across the world to try out. (Links for these Half-Full and Shapes tasks are below.) It was astounding how powerful I felt being able to take something I created and get it out into the internet wilderness for others to see.

It was also astounding how much time it took. I learned Javascript to manage the interactivity in the web page, and then once that was working, I switched to Python on the server to manage the data coming from users. For those that have never done this sort of switching, it involves a lot of misplaced semicolons, tabs, and error messages. I accepted that this was the way the web worked – Javascript in front, and Python (or PHP, Rails, Perl, etc.) on the back end. That extra work was what kept someone like me from starting a project on a whim and putting it together. That cost, in the midst of continuing to do my actual job of teaching and assessing students five days a week, was too great.

This was right around the summer of 2013 when a programmer named Dave Major introduced me to Meteor. I did not know the lingo of reactivity or isomorphic Javascript – I just saw the demonstration video on YouTube and thought it was cool. It made the connection between the web page and the server seamless, eliminating the headaches I mentioned earlier. Dave planned to put together some videos and tutorials to help teachers code tools for the classroom using Meteor, and I was obviously on board. Unfortunately, things got in the way, and the video series didn’t end up happening. Still, with Dave’s help, I learned a bit about Meteor and was able to see how easy it was to go from an idea to a working application. I was also incredibly impressed that Meteor made it easy to get an application online with one line: meteor deploy (application-name here) . No FTP, no hostname settings – one line of code in the terminal, and I could share with anybody.

With that server configuration friction eliminated, I had the time to focus on learning to build truly useful tools for myself. I created my standard based grading system called WeinbergCloud that lets students sign up for reassessments, earn credit for the homework and practice they did outside of class, and see the different learning objectives for my course. I created a system for my colleagues to use to award house points for the great things that students did during the school day. I made a registration and timing system for our school’s annual charity 5K run that reduced the paperwork and time required of our all volunteer staff to manage the hundreds of registrants. I spoke at a Meteor DevShop about this a year and a half ago and have continued to learn more since then.

Most importantly to me, it gave me knowledge to share with a class of web programming students, who have learned to create their own apps. One student from last year’s class learned about our library media specialist’s plan to hold a read-a-thon, and asked if he could create an interactive website to show the progress of each class using, you guessed it, Meteor. Here’s a screenshot of the site he created in his spare time:

And yes, all of these apps have been hosted on the free deploy server at *.meteor.com, and yes, I will have to do the work of moving these sites to a new place. The public stance from Meteor has been that the free site should not really be used for production apps, something I’ve clearly been doing for over two years now. I re-read that line on the documentation website back in January and asked myself what I would do if I no longer had access to that site. The result: I did what I am paid to do as a master learner, and learned to host a site on my personal server. That learning was not easy. The process definitely had me scratching my head. But it also meant that I had a better understanding of the value that the free site had given me over my time using it.

The reality is that Meteor has clearly and publicly shifted away from being just being that framework that has a free one line deployment. The framework has so much going for it, and the ability to create interesting apps is not going away. The shift toward doing what one does best requires hard choices, and the free site clearly was something that did not serve that purpose. It means that those of us that value the free deploy as a teaching tool can seek other options for making it as easy to get others in the game as it was for us.

Meteor has helped me be better at my job, and I appreciate their work.

As promised, here are those learning task sites I mentioned before:

Credit Expiration & Standards Based Grading

For the background on my reassessment system, check out this previous post.

Here’s the run down of my progression in using standards based grading over the past couple of years:

When students could reassess whenever they wanted, they often did so without preparation. They also rushed to do as many reassessments as possible at the end of a quarter or semester. I also needed a system to know who had signed up for a reassessment, for which standard they were assessing, and when they were coming in.
Solution: Students needed to complete a reassessment sign-up form through Google Forms that included reflection on work that was done to review a standard. In general though, the reflection on these forms wasn’t strong. I needed more, but didn’t get around to clearly defining what I meant by strong reflection.
The difficulty of scanning through a form and getting the information I needed prompted me to create an online site using the Meteor programming framework that lets students sign up for reassessments. In real-time, this sorts the reassessments for a given day and helps me stay organized. The problem was that I still wasn’t satisfied with what students needed to do to reassess. They needed to review their mistakes, talk to me, practice and get feedback, and then sign up. Having a way to manage that process was essential.
Solution: The introduction of credits. Students earned credits for working after school, showing me practice problems, and doing other work to support the deliberate practice and learning needed to get closer to mastery.
Many students hoarded their credits until the end of the semester. This prevented the cycle of feedback about learning from continuing, and caused the end of the semester to still be a mad rush to reassess whichever standards are lowest in the grade-book using a machine gun approach.

This brings me to what I wrote about in my year-end reflection about SBG at the end of last year. Hoarding credits and saving them until they want to use them causes less reassessment, and that’s not right. I want to nudge students to reassess more often and know that they should take opportunities as often as possible to show what they know. I’ve threatened to make credit expiration happen since August, and students have been asking when it would start.

No time like the present.

After working on this for a couple of days, I’ve activated a feature on my reassessment management app that allows credits to expire.

Right now, I will be expiring credits manually. I need to see how students respond to this change before the system does this automatically. I get a visual indication that a given credit has expired and click the ‘fire’ button to expire the credit. I can also restore the credit if I change my mind. The asterisk button lets me apply the credit lifetime in the input box to a specific credit and change the expiration.

For old credits, I applied a much longer lifetime, but as students learn to adjust their behavior, I’m starting with a ten day expiration lifetime. That seems to be just the right amount of time to get students assessing within a reasonable amount of time of doing work related to a standard. I don’t think this changes the time pressure to learn something within a given amount of time, which is one of the benefits of SBG. It does change the pressure to assess within a given amount of time, which I do want to happen.

I’m also adjusting some of my policies that cause the hoarding in the first place. Some of this tendency was a consequence of my system – I haven’t let students go from a 5 to a 10 (on a ten point scale) with one assessment session. Mastery is demonstrated over time. I typically had students go from a 5 to an 8 on a perfect first assessment, and then left it there until the unit exam, when students can demonstrate mastery of standards in the context of many other problems.

I’m planning to loosen this progression in light of the credit expiration changes here. If a student is able to demonstrate the ability to answer questions related to a standard, no matter what I throw at them, that’s a pretty good hint on their mastery level. It’s up to me to give reassessment questions that measure what I’m looking for though. That’s where the art of good assessment and experience comes in. I reserve the right to not raise the mastery level if I’m not convinced of a student’s level – students know that taking a reassessment does not automatically mean their level will be raised. As long as that understanding continues, I think these changes will lead to better learning.

As always, I’ll keep you all updated with how well this works in practice. I can always turn this feature off if it’s a disaster.

#TeachersCoding: Improving Report Writing with CommentHelper

Whenever I start the process of report card comments, I always think of how I might make things more efficient. Text-expander? A comment bank nearby for cutting and pasting common phrases? In the end, however, I end up writing them all from scratch anyway, usually in a spreadsheet. Storing comments that way means that over the course of a year, I can see the progression of my comments for a given student. I like being able to do that, but using a spreadsheet as a writing interface is lousy.

I started thinking about my comments workflow a bit earlier than usual, so there was time to think about using code to redesign the process. I write a lot of the same things over and over again in the process of writing comments. Might it be possible to use code to make this more efficient?

The first thing I thought to do was some word analysis to figure out what phrases to use. I picked up a nifty book: Web Scraping with Python which has a chapter on language processing. There I learned about the n-gram library in Python, which has the ability to parse text for phrases of a given length. I took the text of my comments from last year and ran them through a script to create a list of three, four, and five word phrases that appeared multiple times. I then took this list and embedded it in a file that used the jQueryUI Autocomplete function to make those common phrases available.

Here was what I ended up with:

The common text area is where I put the blurb about the course that is common to each class of students. Clicking the ‘Add Common’ button adds that text to the text box below. I type the student specific text into the horizontal box below that button, and hitting the right arrow key dumps that text into the comment box below and clears out the text input. As I type into the middle text box, common phrases pop up, and I can select them with the arrow keys.

How well did this work? Well, the autocomplete thing didn’t end up being that useful. The phrases that my script picked up certainly showed up frequently in the words that I typed, but it didn’t feel like using them saved much time. The autocomplete function I put in only matches the complete text in that box, so I would have had to know in advance that I wanted a common phrase, hit the arrow key, and then start typing that phrase afterwards. Not really a time saver. I suppose curating those phrases a bit more carefully would have made for a better use of that function.

What was interesting, however, was that it was easier for me to focus when I was constantly writing in the text box, and then appending that text to the comment when I knew the text was the way I wanted it. Clearing out the text each time made it easier to say exactly what I wanted to say without having to read the entire sentence before. I occasionally moved down to the comment box to patch up the wording directly, but most of the text input was through that middle box. I wonder if clearing the box also cleared my head to let me think what I wanted to say next.

Anyway, it was a fun exercise. Feel free to adapt and use for your own purposes. You can download the code from Github as a zip file. The file comment-helper.html is the file you want to open. You could clear out the phrases in the phrases.js file and use your own.

Let me know if you try this to good effect. Happy coding, and happy Friday everyone!

Building (Ev)anAcademy Exercises for Reassessments

I’ve written multiple times previously about WeinbergCloud, the system I created using the Meteor framework that lets students sign up for reassessments. Over the course of the semester, I’ve been developing some aspects of the system that I’m excited about, and I’ll talk about them all eventually. One in particular has held my focus for the past few days, and it’s probably the one feature I’ve been talking about for the longest: building a reassessment engine within the system.

Part of this is out of necessity. The wireless network settings on our school network have changed, so the Python reassessment engine that I’ve used for reassessments over the last two years no longer works when hosted on my personal laptop. I’ve managed reasonably well this year using problems from textbooks and handouts, but it became time to automate this using my new knowledge of Javascript and Meteor.

Whatever your feelings about Khan Academy, the reality is that the organization has put a lot of energy and resources into developing a pretty comprehensive web application built around assessment. Not only are these resources available for free for teachers and students to use, but the source code is as well. The code for anyone to be able to run their own local version of exercises has been around for a while at Github here. The Javascript libraries that go with these exercises are also pretty impressive and capable – generating random numbers with constraints, simplifying fractions and expressions, and numerous other helper functions are already written by people that code much better than I do. They also wrote a math-typesetting library called KaTEX that has some performance advantages over some other libraries…or so I hear. I’m sure much of the ‘why’ here is lost on me.

After two days of tinkering, I’ve adapted some of their code in my app for the purposes of generating questions for reassessments. Writing questions and defining variables is all done in HTML, just as in their own local application, which means it’s possible to add questions without having to load in a database through FTP or some other method. The code rendering the questions onto the webpage I had to write myself, but eventually I determined some ways to make this work for me.

I can put in HTML and Javascript definitions into text areas. Here’s an example of a question asking for a simplified fraction for slope:

A preview appears below to make sure the question appears the way I want it. In the variable definitions are strings of Javascript code that calculate and define the variables using the Khan Academy utility functions. The question text is then rendered using KaTEX. The random values change on each reload of the page, but these values could potentially be fixed for an individual student’s quiz.

As I create frames for questions, I get a virtually infinite supply of questions I can use for assessing students on learning. Here are a bunch that I put together for testing the interface:

The next step is to link each question frame to a course standard and build my database of questions. I’m loving the possibilities for building on this further, and will share as they develop. Stay tuned.

#TeachersCoding: Building an Image Downloader for WODB

If you read my blog regularly, you know how I feel about using technology to manage repetitive tasks. It’s intimidating to learn to code without purpose. Seeing how code can be used in the context of making a teacher’s job easier is a much more direct motivation for learning to do it yourself.

Here’s my next installment in the TeachersCoding series. In four minutes, you get the basic steps and tools for putting together a Python program that will download images from Mary Bourassa‘s excellent Which One Doesn’t Belong website . All that’s missing is you going through the steps yourself:

This program doesn’t download all of the images from the website – that’s a task for you to figure out and do on your own. It doesn’t take much. My goal is to have more teachers get hooked by the thrill of seeing code they create do something that is practical and adaptable to their own purposes. We need to grow our ranks.

Share any issues you find in the comments below. I’m excited to get this out there and see what you do with it.

Relevant links:

Christopher Danielson’s Blog – Talking Math With Your Kids
Github files: http://www.github.com/emwdx/wodb/
Python downloads: http://www.python.org/downloads/

#TeachersCoding: Building a VotingBooth with MeteorPad

I previously wrote about a game that I had students build as part of our Meteor app building unit.

Here’s another video series that would be of much better use to teachers: Have students vote on an answer to a question. The example I gave in class was of students voting on which picture of my dog Mileaux was the best.

This is a fairly simple application of Meteor principles that could be useful in a classroom setting. Since it’s all done on MeteorPad, you don’t have to install anything on your computer. If you threw this together, and then wanted to actually give it to a class, you could give them the link highlighted in red in the image below. NOTE: This link will change whenever you reload the Meteorpad page, so make sure you share the one corresponding to your instance of the application.

You can visit the fully functioning code and try it out at this link:
VoteForMileaux – MeteorPad

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