Fun Maps with Place My Past

I’ve mentioned before that Place My Past is a new project that I’ve been developing, it’s a tool that can plot your family tree onto a map which can be combined with other spatial information such as historic maps and datasets.

One of the maps that we currently have is a historic map of Brisbane which shows in great detail the streets of Brisbane in the 1920’s.

This map was added to Place My Past via the web interface which provides anyone with the ability to upload a historic map. The user selected three control points, which help line up points on the image with real locations on the map. These lat / long and X / Y positions were used to work out how to warp and translate the image to fit onto a real map. Once this was done the image was sliced up into layers that could be shown at the various zoom levels. The end effect is a nice interactive map with enough detail that a family historian can use it to locate places from ancestors past.

So if your interested in how Brisbane looked back in the 1920’s, feel free to play around on the map. If you have Brisbane ancestors and want to plot your family tree onto this map, be sure to take a look at the features and tools that Place My Past offers.

Grid Finder

I’ve put together a new web application for the Edmodo app store called Grid Finder. It’s designed to introduce students to a grid co-ordinate system.

 

This app has three different question types:

• Match the image to a grid position.
• Match the numerical grid position to an image.
• Follow basic instructions to discover the location of an object.

The app will ask the student 10 questions for each game and will progressively work through grids of 5×5, 7×7 and 10×10.

Teachers have the option to set the game to any of the available grid sizes or game types.
Teachers can also keep track of student progress by viewing the number of games played and the average score of each student in the group.

The app is built with HTML and JavaScript and works on large screen devices (Desktop, tablets, not phones).

I’m really happy with how this turned out and plan on releasing the iOS version soon.

Time Teacher

The first new app that I’ve put together this year is a remake of my iOS Time Teacher app which has been made into a HTML and JavaScript version for the Edmodo app store. It has the same basic game play: a student is asked 10 questions about the time, a question can be one of three types:

• Do the digital and analog clocks match?
• Set the digital clock
• Set the analog clock

The game starts at one hour increments and progressively gets harder by asking questions in 1/2 hour, 15 minute, 10 minute, 5 minute and 1 minute increments. Of course a teacher can setup the game to ask specific game type questions or set the increment level.

Creating the game was fairly straight forward, I made use of the Dojo JavaScript library for the clock and moving the hands.

The app is currently being featured in the Edmodo store.