Play Something, Learn Something

We’re still living through a heatwave here in the south west of England. Apparently it moved on from the rest of the country, so I’m hoping to escape up north for a bit of fresh air soon.

With the summer holidays here, I’ve been spending more time playing games, relaxing, and learning new things. It struck me that some of the best things on the web manage to be both entertaining and educational. So this issue is a collection of websites that do exactly that, from addictive web games and a wonderfully odd animated short to some useful free educational resources.

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Wikitrivia

I really enjoy this game. It reminds me of Play Your Cards Right. The game is simple. You’re given a starting point in history and the year it happened. Then you’re given a series of events and have to place them in the timeline in the correct order. You don’t need to know the exact year, just whether it’s higher or lower than the other things you’ve placed.

This felt really low pressure and I enjoyed getting things in the right order. Plus, it didn’t make me feel as stupid as some of the other games. Even when I got things wrong, the distance between the positions was often small, so I felt like I was learning things rather than just being bad at history.

TimeGuessr

TimeGuessr makes you feel a bit like a detective. You have to guess when and where a photo was taken. The photos vary in age quite a lot, and some of them are very recent. I’m writing this on Sunday 26th July, and the first photo in the daily challenge is of Joe Biden.

You can zoom into the photos looking for clues, from languages and recognisable landmarks to architecture, cars, fashion, and even the quality of the photograph. It certainly made me pay more attention to the details in the photos rather than glancing at them and moving on.

I Love Hue

This is the sort of browser-based game we might have put on Miniclip 20 years ago. It’s a simple game where you have to rearrange a grid of coloured tiles to make a gradient fit.

It’s a simple concept, but I found it surprisingly enjoyable, especially considering my colour blindness. There were a few points where I couldn’t tell the colours apart, but looking at the brightness of the tiles was usually enough to work around it. I’m the sort of person who likes to sort pens and paints by colour so this is right up my alley.

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Ducks

Ducks is a short film about some ducks by AJ Jeffries. It’s a bit odd, but it’s also very funny and deserving of multiple viewings.

I don’t want to spoil it, but I love the distinct design and art direction. Don’t go into this thinking it’ll be something like a Pixar short. It’s very different, and very enjoyable.

I love seeing people experiment with unusual ideas and distinctive styles because they often inspire my own projects. Ducks is exactly that sort of film. It also made me laugh, which is always a bonus. If you like this, you may also enjoy H O R S E by the same creator.

Watch Ducks 🦆

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Sporcle

I’d somehow never come across Sporcle before, despite it being around for years. It’s a huge collection of quizzes covering almost every topic you can think of from geography to history to pop culture and more. The quizzes themselves are quite simple, but it’s easy to lose track of time hopping from one to the next.

Geohistory

Give me a globe and a pin and I’ll happily disappear for hours.

Geohistory was actually suggested to me by Alex, the same friend who mentioned Anthropeum a couple of issues ago. Geohistory is a game that tests your knowledge of geography and history by asking you to place historical events on a world map. I found it to have an American slant, but it does cover world history. I also found it to be trickier than some of the other games, although some of the questions were very straightforward. Like Wikitrivia, it turns history into something you explore rather than memorise. I like that at the end of the game you get a summary of your performance with a larger explanation of the historical context.

I did run into an issue with the interface which happened when I was switching tabs to check things things out. The problem was that when you switch back the app reloads, and this sometimes resets the question so you have to check if you’ve already answered the current question or not. If you don’t switch tabs it behaves better.

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Free Education

If today’s games have inspired you to learn something more seriously, here are a few fantastic free resources I discovered recently.

These are mostly from US universities. You don’t get the tutors, feedback, peer support, or the eventual qualification, but you do get access to the course materials and can work through them at your own pace.

This is great for people who want to learn something new without the pressure of exams or the expense of a full education.

• MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.
• Saylor Academy offers free online courses at the college and professional levels.
• OpenStax is part of Rice University and provides free, peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks that are available in free digital formats and at low cost in print.

Finally, a possible bonus option that you may already know about is Khan Academy

This non-profit educational organisation provides free online educational resources. It covers a wide range of subjects, including maths, science, economics, history, and more. The platform offers instructional videos, practice exercises, and a personalised learning dashboard that allows learners to study at their own pace.

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Project Updates

I’ve paused the sky creation tool I’ve been working on for now. It’s come on leaps and bounds, and I even managed to remove about 1,000 lines of code whilst making it more powerful. However, it’s still quite a complex project, so I wanted to spend some time building something that might help pay the bills.

That led me to a brand new project. 😬

I’m building a browser-based calculator inspired by apps like Soulver. The goal is to make everyday maths quick and easy, whilst keeping it free. It’s already handling calculations, multiple pages, and embeddable calculators for websites. I can also see it being useful for things like maths quizzes and interactive worksheets.

Soulver is a great app, and I’m not trying to replace it. I just think there’s room for something a little different, especially one that’s free and designed for sharing calculators on the web. Plus it’s something I want to use myself, so I hope it can be useful for other people too.

The design still needs a lot of work, but the foundations are there. Hopefully I’ll be able to show it off properly in an issue or two.

I’ve also been using the quieter summer period to work through some long-standing Brush Ninja bug reports and polish a few rough edges.

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Currently…

I’m hoping to head up to Liverpool soon to escape the heat for a few days, so I’ve been listening to quite a lot of The Beatles recently. I was born a little too late to experience them at their peak, but their music has always been around, and it’s been fun rediscovering it. My son has even started singing along to a couple of their songs, so hopefully he’ll enjoy the trip too.

That, in turn, sent me down another nostalgic rabbit hole. I recently rewatched the Phantom of the Opera 25th anniversary performance, and it reminded me just how much I listened to the soundtrack growing up. My parents were big fans of musicals and Michael Crawford, and I can still remember hearing those songs on cassette during long car journeys.

It’s funny how certain places, films, and albums can instantly take you back to another time. I wonder which songs my son will look back on in 30 years’ time.