Polypad

I am super impressed by this. The landing page is GREAT, it really shows you what it can do and I tried creating a polypad and it works just as well as the landing page makes it seem.

I would have loved to have this when I was in school and I can imagine it is a great tool for teachers. I am going to let my kids play around with this.

In rereading my comment it sounds like some sort of lame ad, which I can assure you it isn't. I am just excited about it.

That's really cool. A nice touch is how the help is implement with every widget having a little question mark you can click, and it shows a tutorial on the left panel. Also thank you for letting us in without sign up.

> Amplify (neé Desmos)

It looks like "Amplify Education, Inc" and "Desmos Studio" (Public Benefit Corporation) are separate entities.

The desmos website still shows that most of the Desmos "math tools" still exist under the Desmos name (graphing calculator, scientific calculator, four function, matrix, geometry, 3D), but that "Desmos Classroom" specifically has been renamed to "Amplify Classroom" [1].

The amplify usage guidelines [2] say that "Amplify does not own but partners with Desmos Studio, the maker of a suite of free math tools, including a graphing calculator used by over 75 million people around the world. (See desmos.com for more information.)"

[1]: https://www.desmos.com/

[2]: https://amplify.com/ac-usage-guidelines/

An edtech product that illustrates mathematical relationships through colors and shapes.

One of my favorite projects that I ever worked on was an project that is really reminiscent of this. The project was to create a browser-based educational tangram[1] puzzle game for kids. It was filled with neat mathematical challenges like how to implement "snapping" between puzzle pieces. The most interesting was how to detect when a puzzle was "complete" or "incorrect" since there can be multiple valid solutions (and I didn't want to find them all) and the library had to accommodate the addition of new puzzles, meaning the approach had to be generic.

We ended up with some rules like "all puzzle pieces must be adjacent to another puzzle piece", "no puzzle piece may overlap another puzzle piece", and "all puzzle pieces must overlap the silhouette" (the puzzle goal), and "no piece may partially overlap the silhouette".

I didn't really know how to detect "overlap" reliably so I ended up implementing some heuristic methods. I remember tearing my hair out over the way JavaScript numbers worked and figuring out how to reliably compare floating point numbers. Good times.

The github repo for the library is still around. Last commit... 9 years ago, woof, time flies! And of course one of the last commits is "Fix overlap bug". Figures.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangram [2] https://github.com/gabesullice/libshapes