Seconded. I appreciate javascript unnecessary sites. Although, if something really requires js im okay with it. Theres some demos i have on my personal site that straight uo require js which i think is fine
Yeah I should. Problem is that I need to put some finishing touches on it before it would be usable for other people and I don't have access to the system anymore because I graduated so I need to find someone with access to test it out. If anyone has access to myspanishlab by Pearson let me know!
This was implemented in some of my classwork when I was attending university - for my language and intro physics classes. Unfortunately, the classes that I took that did this had outlandishly bad commercial implementations of this that we were required to use. Basically, we would watch short video lectures on the topic and then have some homework on the video's topic. Unfortunately, there seems to be no pressure for these companies to make a nice-to-use service, since every website I had to use for this was implemented quite horribly.
One example of how terrible these services are was from my foreign language class. Pearson (fuck Pearson) has a service for that which strictly disallows any international keyboard input, and to write non a-z characters you would have to use their very clunky ui. And for their video player would not allow you to rewind or skip forward in any useful way.
I ended up writing some greasemonkey scripts to re render all of their web content. While doing so, I figured out that they also send all of their answers to homework in the html, so I also wrote a script that could allow you to see the answers - which I ended up using sometimes when questions had multiple correct answers but I couldn't figure out which one the homework system wanted(i.e. different words possible, multiple valid verb conjugations valid, etc.).
It's a shame that online textbook/lecture/homework systems for college coursework tend to be so terribly designed - the most difficult part of coursework shouldn't have to be figuring out how to interface with a clunky web ui. I think there is serious potential for a company to make a well-designed system for coursework if they could market it to colleges correctly - maybe survey students on what they like/don't like about existing products and show to colleges that these systems are seriously lacking. Unfortunately, the big textbook companies seem to have a monopoly on curriculum design, so getting these systems to mesh well with the curriculum could be difficult.
Cool demo! One thing you could do to improve this is use quaternions to handle rotation of the cube. There are some great articles on implementing quaternions out there if you search for them. For example, I noticed when you turn a cube "upside down", the dragging to the left or right (with ctrl pressed) rotates the cube the wrong way. Quaternions are a great way to solve this issue