Simple Wooden Puzzle – Plans & Instructions

Posted on September 12, 2010 by Stephen

I remember making this puzzle in woodwork class in secondary school. I’m not sure what the name of this puzzle is, but from a quick Internet search, it seems to be called “the cross”. It was a good project to practice the following skills:

  • Marking Out (Note the face side & face edge marks)
  • Mortise and Tenon Joints (using a mortise gauge)
  • Creating Chamfers (making a “thumb gauge” and putting chamfers on end grain)
  • Sawing of Timber (scoring cutting lines for a cleaner cut)


We made the puzzle out of white deal pine (low cost, and difficult to cut cleanly). Three coats of varnish/lacquer helped the puzzle resist damage to its surface, especially with all the assembling and disassembling. In case anyone would like to make this puzzle, here are the plans in PDF format.

After I had the 3 pieces made, putting the puzzle together was actually more difficult than I thought. Trying to form the cross shape was tricky, trying to put together the 3 pieces in all possible combinations. Taking the puzzle apart was easy enough. Anyways to help, I made a video of how to disassemble and assemble the puzzle (maybe try it first before resorting to the video solution).

Looking around the Internet there are loads of websites showing different puzzles. I came across a variant of the above with rounded edges, however this would be very tricky to shape using hand tools and would require a router.

While this is a simple puzzle to figure out, it really is a good woodwork project to get students interested, and covers some excellent marking-out and hand skills. In case anyone is interested, I modeled this up quickly using SolidWorks, created the drawings (pdf), rendering (top right) and animation.

Posted in Educational, Puzzles | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Camtasia Video Player

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Stephen

Camtasia is a popular commercial screen recorder. It can record your computer screen, audio and input from a web camera. While it can produce a FLV output, many people accept the defaults and an AVI is produced, which requires a camtasia “techsmith” codec to play back. While you can download and install the codec, it may not install if you do not have Administrative Rights on the computer.

Instead, you can use the CamPlay executable program to play the AVI. Download and save the camplay.exe and then go File -> Open -> video.avi
Download the executable player (no install required). (Local Mirror Here 380KB)

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My Final Year Project – Interactive Educational Website

Posted on August 17, 2010 by Stephen

I recently came across the PDF write-up and ISO CD Image of my Final Year Project. It was for the Bachelor of Technology (Education) in Materials and Construction degree, which I completed in 2003 in the University of Limerick.

Introduction

An interactive educational website was designed and developed to increase a students visualisation and spatial abilities. The topic of orthographic projection was the main focus of the educational website. Other websites at the time lacked interactivity. The website developed for this project had multiple choice questions and an interactive drawing board where a student could test their visualisation abilities through task based problem solving. 3D models and animations also featured throughout the website.

Students results were saved to a database, allowing them to check their progress and also allowing a teacher to login and view students progress. A paper based pre-test and post-test was designed and given to students before and after spending time using the educational website. Statistical information on students progress was discussed. It was concluded that this interactive educational website enhanced students visualisation abilities and knowledge on orthographic projections which also provided for effective and enriched student learning and outcomes. This was achieved by using virtual reality three-dimensional models, controllable animations, everyday models and interactive assessment methods.

Technology Used

There was a lot of technology and setup which went into this interactive website. 3D Models were designed in SolidWorks and animated using Studio Max. The main content of the website was static html. The multiple-choice questions and interactive drawing exercises were served using Tomcat. As this had to be piloted in schools where there may not have been any Internet, a Live CD was created which on-top of windows would auto-run Tomcat and hsqldb. This could be run on a teachers computer, and students could then browse to http://teacherscomputername:8080 and login to the website.

There was an Interactive Drawing Assessment section which was particularly innovative. A video of this can be seen below. If you want to experience and give this a try, feel free to download the ISO, burn it to a CD and pop it into your computer to auto-run. The CD should auto-run, and work on XP,Vista,Windows7. I can’t take full credit for developing this Java app however, and that goes to my brotherwho done a good deal of the back-end code.

A few years ago I recoded the Interactive website in PHP and MySQL and made it available online. You can visit the Interactive Geometry Website here. Unfortunately however it does not contain this Interactive Drawing Assessment section. You’ll need the Live CD to use that.

FYP Write-up

For those of you who are interested in reading more, I’ve put a PDF of the complete FYP write-up. You can see the image of the CD I printed out on the original also.

If anyone has any comments or questions, you can email me (stephen at sburke.eu)
If you are going to reference anything from this FYP Project, place a link to this page.

Posted in Educational, Web Development | 1 Comment

Rubik’s Cube Puzzle

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Stephen

I had planned to write about some of my favourite puzzles. Today it was discovered that any Rubiks cube (3×3) can be solved in 20 moves or less (www.cube20.org). Recently I learned how to solve a 3×3 rubiks cube, and it takes many more than 20 moves! It’s all about combinations and learning moves.

7.08 seconds is the world record for solving a Rubiks Cube. Below is a video showing this world record. In a following post I’ll add details of how I solve the rubiks cube, albeit a good deal slower, and it won’t be like I done when I was younger and peel off the stickers!

If you want to give the Rubiks Cube a go to bring back some memories, head over to www.cube20.org or here, where there is a Java Applet which can let you have a go.

Posted in Puzzles | 3 Comments

Web Design and Google Translator

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Stephen

People visiting your website may come from many different nationalities and may not speak English. The majority of these people use “Google Translate” to convert websites into their native language. I seen this with the kartbuilding.net website where I was surprised at how many people used Google Translator to view the website.

As a result, websites should be designed and tested with Google Translator.

Unfortunately Google does mess with the underlying html code, adding in extra tags and css. As a result your website may not render correctly, be readable or even work at all if you have used javascript for certain things. It should be possible however to make your website fully compatible with Google Translator so it will show up correctly. I found the following issues to be observed:

  • Avoid redefining the <style> tag in your css.
    For example, I had:
    <div class=”roundedcorner”><style>Content here</style></div>
    I redefined the style tag itself in css, trying to be neat and quick, to have a background image and height of 5px. Thus it broke with Google Translator.
    I had to modify it to the following below and remove the css from the style tag. 
    <div class=”roundedcorner”><style class=”roundedbottom”>Content here</style></div>
  • Don’t place strange characters inside a href tags.
    For example, I had: <a href=”#”>Test ?</a>. The ? mark broke things and messed up the display.
  • Note: Google strips some single and double quotes (” and ‘).
    As a result after the translation, html will show up as <div class=roundedcorner>Text..</div>. This shouldn’t break things however.
  • When testing with Google Translator, you may find that it caches files. You can force Google to show the most recent design by adding “?test=123” to the end of the URL.
    For example: http://yourwebsite/page.html?test=213 (and to change the number at the end each time).

Hopefully watching out for the above points will have your websites render correctly with Google Translate. Javascript should work ok also. If you do have issues, I suggest viewing the html source of the Google Translated page, and break it down. A final note: if you have a login required to access your website, then Google Translate won’t work.

http://translate.google.com

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