Let's Play Ancient Greek Geometry (blog.sciencevsmagic.net)

Hey, this is neat! One note: Hitting "reset" doesn't immediately reset the move counter; I have to hit "undo" afterward to get it to actually go back to 0.

So much for getting anything done this morning . . .

Great app and a super achievement for someone who's only been working in JS for 8 months.

This is awesome!

Thoughts: after clicking, sometimes I decide I want to cancel drawing from that point. I can click on the original point to cancel, it would be nice to be able to press ESC or SPACE to cancel drawing (just noticed that Z for undo cancels).

For the "game" side, it is very important to have simple tasks that almost all players can complete to get started. I would add an even simpler first challenge, such as make two overlapping circles.

I would love to be able to share constructions. I'm thinking a button I press that pops up a URL that I can share. When visited it shows an animation drawing the construction, then when done lets you do more drawing. That would be cool.

  else if (e.keyCode === 27) {
    deselect();
  }

  else if (e.keyCode === 90) {
      //"z"
      if (e.shiftKey) {
          changes.redo();
      }
      else {
          changes.undo();
          changes.record(1);
      }
  }

  window.location.hash=currenthash;
  ...
  window.location.hash=hash;

  window.location.replace(currenthash);
  ...
  window.location.replace(hash);

  var appKeys = { "Esc": 27 };

  else if (e.keyCode === appKeys.Esc) {

Very good work, well done.

Not as good as Guass though :)

Gauss' breakthrough occurred in 1796 when he was 19. He showed that any regular polygon with a number of sides which is a Fermat prime [p = 2^(2^n) + 1] (and, consequently, those polygons with any number of sides which is the product of distinct Fermat primes and a power of 2) can be constructed by compass and straightedge.

This is damned cool. Having something like this makes it easy and convenient to explore geometry without the inconveniences imposed by physical media. Having specific goals to work towards and target move counts is icing on the cake.

Thank you for making this. Find a way to get this out there to geometry teachers. They (and their students) will love it.

--

Suggested improvements:

+ Option to switch between a couple colors or line types, to make it easier to track what one's doing. (E.g., laying down foundational lines in black, then experimental lines in blue or dashed lines.

+ One minor thing I'd like to see fixed: the proximity of the numerical goals to the shapes they're associated with doesn't make it clear whether (e.g.) the 8 move goal is an easy version of the "build a triangle in X moves," or whether 8 moves is the least amount of moves for building a triangle inside an origin circle.

Suggested fix: make that more apparent by tweaking the order of the symbols (e.g. Triangle, 5, 8, OriginTriangle) and/or adding a divider of some manner to make them stand apart more.

I got a triangle made inside a circle. Can someone tell me why the triangle in origin circle thing doesn't complete?

http://www.sciencevsmagic.net/geo/#0A1.1A0.0L2.0L1.1L2.1L6.2...

Reminds me of kig [ http://edu.kde.org/kig/ ].

Me:

   A Hexagon in 10 moves or less? How does that even...

   oh... OH... neat.

Fun game.

This is amazingly fun. I'm a little stuck on the pentagon, but I'll keep thinking.

Side note: You should add "Square the Circle" as a super bonus ;)

I second the vote for select-able colors. Even though I'm color blind, I think having multiple colors would help keep myself organized while creating.

Love it! But I am having a hard time figuring out when exactly I can/can't "pick up" a point from somewhere else: sometimes tick marks appear at the distance I'm looking for, sometimes not. Also, it seems odd that I can't just draw a line (as opposed to line segment), since iirc the straightedge is theoretically infinite. (There are definitely a few times I've wanted to lay down the full line traversing two points, for later use in the construction....)

EDIT: it looks like the tick marks are the straight line extensions; if so, it's exceedingly strange that I can use them "for free" (without drawing the line) as, say, guides for the radius of a circle (I can't put the centre there, but I can "end" the circle there), but I can't just have the line itself.

Takes me back to high school geometry class. For a while I was carrying a compass and a straight edge /everywhere/. First math class I really enjoyed.

It's great. I wish I had something like this back in higschool when learning geometry; doing it on paper with the accumulating inaccuracies and no undo option made it all much less fun than this.

This guy's got lots of neat toys. http://www.sciencevsmagic.net/fractal/#0090,0180,2,2,1,0,5

If you want to go farther: a powerful, open, and fully-featured tool for doing this on the desktop (and soon tablet), along with a CAS and other facilities is GeoGebra: http://www.geogebra.org/cms/en/

If you want to go deeper: http://www.woodenbooks.com/ which are, for want of a better term, 'rigorous mysticism.'

This is very neat. Because some of the more complicated constructions get very busy, it would be helpful to be able to erase unwanted arcs/lines.

I love this! Only complaint is that after playing for a few minutes, my browser's back button is completely worthless. Web is such a hacky place to develop.

Inspiring!

(1) Geometric stained glass windows. Anyone know how to cheaply source/cut coloured glass? Best mechanism for rounded portions of potential framing? I don't mind if it takes awhile to build, just that it sustains the weight and enough wind. Preferably thicker rather than thinner glass.

(2) Might be useful for some 3D printing based crafting projects.

An option to export SVG would be useful (and feasible, given the vector nature of construction).

That's it, I'm abandoning my lesson plans for today and I'm going to let the kids have a go at these challanges instead. Well done.