I wanted to write a quick post updating the latest happenings as the school year begins, and we march on towards Fall and before we know it, the holiday season!

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been diligently building out some infrastructure for providing the long awaited update to my Cloudy Logic iOS app. I realize that I’m the only person waiting for this update, but hey, that still counts!

Since switching to an Android phone late last year, I’ve been eager to get an update out for the app, and to finally write something for the Google Play store. Because the first version of the app had pretty much everything hard-coded into the app itself, one of the goals this time around was to separate that out into some type of RESTful API, so that the app would basically be “current” without requiring a new version in the App Store or on Google Play.

So that led me to building out a project I call CLSRESTAPI, written in PHP, with the source code available over on my GitHub page right here. You can access the API directly by hitting this link, and then using the JavaScript front end built-in to the site to see the JSON output of each API call.

Next up was to write a set of Java classes that would expose the API, and provide the building blocks for the Android version of the app. I just finished the first version of that a few days ago, and of course, the source code is available on GitHub right here.

I’ve also written a command line tester in Python, source code here, and another command line tester in Java, source code here.

I’m currently working on a Java Swing GUI that will run on the various desktop OS’es, and let me finish fleshing out the API in a more realistic environment, that is, more like what I’ll be using on Android and iOS.

Having a lot of fun with this, and can’t wait to get the new versions of the app out for both platforms. As I continue to make progress, I’ll keep the source over on my GitHub page, so keep checking there to see the latest on everything!

Thanks for stopping by!

-ken

Magic Square Puzzle Maker for Teachers

https://kenlowrie.com/apps/magicsquarev1

Recently I was visiting with an old friend, Louise, okay, she’s not old, nor am I, but that’s neither important nor relevant to this story. Anyway, I was visiting with Louise, and we got to talking about ideas for apps (I was looking for ideas for a smart phone app that could be monetized, by the way, I’m still looking for ideas on that subject, but I digress…).

Anyway, Louise started telling me about an app that she wanted built for making quizzes for her high school chemistry classes. It was based on magic squares, and basically, she wanted to provide a list of terms and definitions to the app, and it would then proceed to generate N variations of jumbled definitions and different magic squares based on the one set of terms. The basic idea here is that it would make it inconvenient for students to directly copy answers, since there are many variations of the squares and the order of terms and definitions. Instead, they would have to discuss the terms and definitions, e.g. “who was the scientist who discovered the electron?”, in effect, they would be tricked into studying…

I was intrigued, and momentarily distracted by a bee (sorry, once again not relevant)… So, I agreed to look into building such an app, and once I finished, it seemed as though it was useful enough that I decided to share it with others. So, I am hosting it here on my website, and you’re free to use it as you see fit. I do hope you find it useful, and I’m certainly open to any comments you have on the subject (or other irrelevant subjects such as bees or age), so long as they are constructive. 🙂

Happy Teaching!
-ken

P.S. Many thanks to Stephen Lowrie for providing support for building the algorithms used for generating the magic squares. Someday, I should probably look at using the code he wrote for generating even numbered magic squares, as that would be a nice addition to the app.