joebacal.work

• ⭐ Active Reading Cards   A prototype application that encourages active reading strategies.
• Bee Solver   While on vacation with my in-laws I accepted a friendly challenge that I could make a command line app to solve the Spelling Bee faster than my father-in-law and son could solve it using their actual brains. I succeeded thanks to a freely available list of all the words.
• CLAMP Recognition Award   I was the recipient of the 2016-2017 Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project Recognition Award. My contributions were meager compared to the titanic ones of Kevin Williarty and Charles Fulton, but appreciated the recognition of my fledgling contributions.
• ⭐ Challenge Galaxy   Open-ended Scratch challenges with optional hints.
• ⭐ Chinese Character Literacy   I rebuilt this project that a group of Smith professors had been working on for a number of years. I leveraged WordPress CMS capabilities to add structure and discoverability to the existing data.
• Compose Music with Python and EarSketch    Workshop deck for starting up with EarSketch
• ⭐ Digital Block Area   A blog I used to write for real, and now is mostly written in my head.
• ⭐ Front End Basics Course   Course site I created to teach a community-based adult education summer workshop on front end web development.
• ⭐ Fun Times   I little practice tool I made for kids to learn their multiplication facts.
• ⭐ Geography Click   A little prototype world geography quiz thing. Leverages Highcharts and a the countries API.
• Google Classroom Copy Pal   While teaching remotely during COVID, I found I had to copy and paste items from a Google Classroom page in order to communicate with families accross platforms. Turns out this is really hard due to Google UI decisions. So I made a Chrome extension that allows you to select and copy items.
• Google Sheets Data in Your Django App   I had to get some data from a Google sheet into a Django application. This was the important bit.
• Google Sheets to Docs Merge Script   One often needs to create Google Docs that express Google Sheet data. This is a basic Google Apps Script template for doing that.
• H5P Presentation at Hack/Doc   I presented on how we can help instructors and students author interactive content using the amazing H5P library.
• Invention is Bugs and Iterations   A deck I use to tell the story of how invention is a process and full of errors and try-agains.
• Moodle to Webwork Utility   The math department needed a quick way to get Moodle students into WebWork. This Moodle plugin outputs a file of students in the correct format.
• ⭐ Netlify Auth & Sanity Data   A demonstration/proof-of-concept application that allows a user to sign up, login, and write user-scoped data to a Sanity.io private datastore.
• ⭐ Self-Evident Education   I designed and built the CMS and front-end application for this funded educational non-profit.
• Simplest Task Bot   This is the driving base I use in class. It's a much simpler build than the "official" one, and has a simple-as-possible gear assembly for actuators on two planes.
• ⭐ Smith College Educational Technology Help Site   A content management and authoring system to create consistent, visually pleasing help documentation.
• Sphero Challenge: Model an Animal   An open-ended challenge for getting started with Sphero.
• The Homework Machine   Mwa ha ha ha ha!
• ⭐ Truck-Eating Bridge Solutions   This was a project I led as a fifth grade teacher. Students researched and created proofs-of-concept for solutions to our local "Truck Eating Bridge" problem.
• Use Sensor Data in your Scratch Program   Materials for a lesson on using sensor data as an input parameter
• WP Campus Conference Presentation on WordPress and Academic Projects   I really, really, like information architecture, and I like to think about how people interface their thoughts with database structures.
• What's a Button?   Deck for a lesson on making physical buttons with micro:bit