Web Sketchpad
I worked a lot in my career on The Geometer's Sketchpad, an educational geometry visualization and interaction desktop application. Sketchpad had a long and useful life, finally retired as a product in 2019. Twenty-five years! It's still in use as an authoring environment for the HTML5 web viewer.
Web Sketchpad
Web Sketchpad is HTML5 viewer for Geometer's Sketchpad documents. This was a ground-up re-implementation of the desktop software's internal C logic into HTML5 / JavaScript.
- Some of it's pedagogical potential can be seen in it's construction tools or pre constructed activities.
- You can see a engineering-centric usage in an engineering presentation I gave on cycle detection (navigate with the right and left arrow).
I learned a tremendous amount about HTML/CSS/JavaScript while working on this. Looking back, it holds up pretty well:
- We limited dependent libraries. There are a few, but it's not an
npm installfest. - HTML Canvas rendering has stayed reasonably performant. Not pining for SVG.
Things I'd re-work:
- Remove the dependency on jQuery. In fact, we didn't need it. Useful and comforting while learning, though.
- Use a modern build pipeline like Webpack.
- Use Typescript. Even a modest amount of type checking would help catch some bugs.
- Work on accessibility from the get-go.