Well, DadsWorksheets.com is now officially one year old. We’ve come a long way. We’ve seen over 300,000 visits to the site that generated over 2.25 million page views. And of course, 3,937 free worksheets.

We’re about to start another school year, which will be fourth grade and kindergarten here. I’m looking forward to the challenges that a new school year brings, and hope you’ll stop by to share in the fun. It will be great to see where we’re at in another year. Thanks for everyone’s support!

For years, Dad was a two-OS guy, with two computers (a Mac and a Windows machine) whirring away on the desk. I was multitasking before multitasking was even a word, but I did most of the day-to-day computing on a Mac. In fact, all of the business accounting still happens on an ancient PowerMac G3 that I’ve dredged out of the closet annually for the last decade or so. But, at some point it just made more sense to only upgrade, backup and power one computer, and since the day job involved building Win32 applications, there wasn’t much choice in which OS I wound up with. Until now.

The new Intel based Macs run Windows (via Parallels) very efficiently, especially the latest Xeon based Mac Pro towers. In fact, according to the PassMark benchmark my new Windows XP environment under Parallels is 300% faster than my old physical computer, and Visual Studio almost seems pleasant to use now.

All of which means, I’m still on one computer, just one that is mostly sane most of the time now. And I can create and destroy virtual Windows machines for work projects at will. Bwahahaha!

Having exiting the Mac arena prior to OS X coming on the scene, most of Dad’s Mac skills are sadly out of date. But fear not! Several years of UNIX programming on several projects along with a recent tour of duty building a Django site on a SliceHost partition has certainly been helpful, and ultimately it’s great to have a real shell again. I mean, just in case you wonder what I’m really doing all day.

Anyway, the latest worksheet refresh was built on the new machine, and involved porting the Python project over. I’m continually amazed by Python and the only snag I ran into was in places where I’d hard-coded some file system paths. The worksheets now generate faster than ever and I’m looking forward to getting more content up soon!

It’s good to be Mac!

Alright, so I know the Python programming language is actually named after the Monty Python group, but after all, the language’s logo (shown here) is a pair of snakes.

One of the great things about the site is how easy it has been to build the worksheets using Python, and it’s definitely gotten me out of some jams. Like today. I built all of the recent geometry worksheets using graphics saved in PNG format, which is a loss-less file format, making it somewhat more attractive relative to the older JPEG format. PNG isn’t a terribly new file format, but some people (including my wife) have had trouble printing the new worksheets. What I really needed to do was convert the 361 PNG files on which I’d labored over into JPEGs and then regenerate the worksheets.  Not much fun for a lazy guy like me.

There’s undoubtedly a bunch of freeware graphics converter programs around, but picking out an easy to use one that wasn’t loaded down with adware or spyware isn’t exactly how I wanted to spend my Saturday morning. Enter Python and the awesome Python Imaging Library.

In just a 126 bytes, I had my PNG to JPG converter together…

 import os, Image

for fn in os.listdir('.'):

    if fn[-4:] == '.png':

        Image.open( fn ).save( fn[:-4] + '.jpg' )

If you were having trouble printing any of the new geometry worksheets, please try again.

Thank you, Python!

Here’s an interesting diversion that Johnson Controls posted on their web site recently… It’s borderline being a game, but it’s a great engineering and physics exercise for both parents and kids.  It unfortunately just killed an hour of time that I should have been working on the mean/median worksheets here.

Coconut Run Physics Simulation

The object of the game is to build a small powered cart that moves coconuts across a primitive obstacle coarse. It appears to be a fairly accurate physics simulation, which makes for some very interesting tinkering. It’s too bad they didn’t provide a few more hints for design, but here are a few shortcuts…

• Coconuts shifting their mass around in the cart is bad. If your cart captures the coconuts so they don’t bounce around, the cart will be much more stable.
• A low/wide center of gravity helps prevent your cart from tipping over.  Try to collect the coconuts near the bottom of your design.
• More parts means more mass which means poor acceleration.
• Smaller wheels tend to get stuck in things, but bigger wheels tend to add mass.
• You can actually make your cart quite wide by drawing parts out across where the tool palette is placed on the screen. This will let you put a long forward arm with a wheel on it to help prevent the cart from tipping.

I managed a 63% efficiency score [UPDATE:89%!!] by moving all 15 coconuts to the end in just under a minute. Time invested purely in the name of research, obviously. Enjoy!

After having passed the 2,000 worksheet mark in late September, the site has expanded another 50% to over 3,000 worksheets in less than four months. That’s a rate of approximately 250 worksheets a month, or roughly eight new worksheets a day! If the trend continues, that would put us at 4,000 sheets by the end of the school year, which I’m willing to set as a goal, but only because we’re technically 101 worksheets ahead coming out of the starting blocks…

If you have any requests or ideas for additional worksheets that you think would fit in with the other material here, feel free to post a comment to this post. I’m sure there are lots of great ideas out there and your feedback is appreciated.

Meanwhile, I hope you’ll share the enthusiasm and pass word about the site to parents or teachers whom you think might appreciate the content here. If you have a blog or a web site, a link helps greatly spread the word.

Thanks for your support and see you at 4,000!