Interactives

Looking for a way to share my favorite online math games and interactives, for now... let's just just put them here. Of course, I am a big fan of making your own interactives in GeoGebra.

If your favorite isn't listed - email me at goldenj at gvsu dot edu, or tweet it to @mathhombre.

Essentials:

• GeoGebra
• Desmos
• Wolfram|Alpha
• CoCalc (formerly Sage)

Best Overall:

• Jonathan Hall's collection of html5 manipulatives (mathsbot)
• Science vs Magic: Ancient Greek Geometry - Euclid's constructions as a leveled game. I love this. But there's more at the site than this.
• Inspirograph - best online Spirograph tool for making hypo- and epicycloids. And I'm a fool for Spirograph. Competition for this now from wheelof.com/sketch/
• Game About Squares - simple, clever, elegant, devilish puzzles
• Boolean Box - terrific introduction to boolean logic
• John Conway's Game of Life - kind of the archetypal interactive.
• Tiles, brilliant Penrose tiles applet from Science vs Magic.
• Sam Gratrix's ultimate tessellation applet - even into hyperbolic. Loads of abstract algebra connections.

Collections

• Illuminations Interactives
• Malin Christersson
• Math Learning Center apps. All the classics, on web, iOS, Windows, or Chrome. 
• Math Toybox (flash)
• Mathenaum. Many applets in number, algebra, geometry,  mathart.
• MathMunch's mArTh tools (math+art)
• PhET's simulations. Secondary applets and science applications.
• Simon Fraser University's Dynamic Geometry tools (in Web Sketchpad)
• Thomas Ferguson's Javascript Games - dots & boxes, Nim & variations, and more
• University of Colorado's PHET Simulations
• Freudenthal Institute's Applets (great but in Java)

Virtual Manipulative:

• Jonathan Hall's collection of html5 manipulatives (mathsbot): Base 10, algebra blocks, Cuisenaire rods, pentominos, fractions, ten frames...
• Didax Manipulatives page: geoboard, pattern blocks, rekenrek, unifix, & more...
• National Library
• Math Learning Center: GeoBoard, Base Ten Blocks,  Ten Frames, Number Line, Pattern Blocks...
• Mathsbot has everything
• mathtoybox: Pattern Blocks and number blocks (Cuisenaire rods)
• Nrich: Cuisinaire Rods [Flash] 
• Visnos: Fraction Wall (several others at Visual Numbers)

Number

• Sweet fraction visualizer plus number line. 0-1, reminiscent of Cuisinaire rods.
• Scale of the Universe
• Refraction  - fraction composition and addition in a clever but challenging laser splitting puzzle.
• 2048 and it's arithmetic sequel Just Get 10
• Numbers Addict - my favorite mobile time killer is now a FB game.
• Solve Me mobiles - nice algebra context
• Slice the Pie - estimate fractions in a circle model. Fraction Fred is from the same folks on this engine.
• The Times collection of online number puzzles. KenKen, Suko and more. New puzzles daily.
• Factorization visualizer

Algebra

• Touch Trigonometry
• Balance Applet (Illuminations) - expressions, balance and graphing
• All the graph paper 

Fractal

• Recursive Drawing
• Doodal - very organic interface
• GeoKone  
• GoogleLab's beautiful HTML viewer for Mandelbrot & Julia sets
• Gorgeous viewer of the Mandelbrot set.

Discrete

• Entanglement - lovely and engaging, some subtle discrete math going on.
• Nice Neighbors - puzzles that also compute real math problems.
• Havel-Harikimi - Jacopo Notarstefano illustrating a graph theorem from Erdös and Gallai by letting you build the solutions. 

Geometry

• KaleidoTile (downloadable) by Jeff Weeks
• Isometric Drawing Tool (NCTM Illuminations)
• Euclid: the game. Well done alternative to Science vs Magic at the top.
• Eyeballing Game - weird little game that hones your estimation. 
• Malin Christersson: Hyperbolic Tiling - with your own images
• Pool Practice: billiards interactive that takes into account striking angles and velocity
• Sketchometry - converts hand/mouse drawn lines to geometric objects.
• Circle Packing - a puzzle and a game that come at it from different angles. Circle Packing and Filler
• Z-Rox - identify objects, numbers letters. Trick is, you're in Flatland. You won't play for hours, but so clever. Plus, it gets hard quickly.
• Sam Gratrix polyhedron modeler
• Scissor's Congruence - Brilliant demonstration of the Wallace–Bolyai–Gerwien theorem.
• Brilliant illustration of Scissors Congruence. (Wallace–Bolyai–Gerwien Theorem)
• 4 Color a Dodecahedron - puzzle from Jacopo Notarstefano.

Probability & Statistics

• Excellent visual overview of probability and statistics: Seeing Theory
• Conditional Probability viewer and
• Central Limit Theorem plinkoish experiment. Both from Setosa.
• A different CLT. Love the mean of the samples visualization.
• Excellent Guess the Correlation game.
• Elementary stats data & display with Furbles.
• plot.ly - share and graph data.
• Google public data

Art and Design

• Imaginary: Morenaments - bitpaint in any of the wallpaper groups. [Java] 
• Girih Designer - tessellation tool for Islamic designs that has a wide variety of style options.
• Curvetile - Edmund Harris with a cool Truchet vision.
• color: slightly maddening color matching game 
• Craig Kaplin's Escher spiral tiling applet. See his Tactile tessellation applet, too.
• Malin Christersson:Mondrian Meets Möbius (circle inversions on primary colors) 
• Math is Fun: Spiral Artist, Symmetry Artist  and Tessellation Artist
• Kaleidoscope Painter
• Scribbler, Too - why list this on a math blog? Parameters! The kind of choices digital artists have to make involve setting so many parameters and understanding their effects. Plus - cool effect. 
• Kubist - samples images to make a Picasso-ish version in triangles or Voronoi cells. 
• Koalas to the Max - lots of dots. It only does one thing but is oddly fun. 
• Cycloid Maker (Think Spirograph on steroids.) 
• Spiralateral Maker (very customizable) 
• Shout out: Dan Anderson's Processing Page. So much, so good.

Puzzles

• Game About Squares - great logic puzzler + clever (also an app)
• Figure Ground - Scott Kim's ideas, playing with positive and negative space.
• Puzzle School: Code Puzzles - teach you HTML and Javascript
• Math Resources: Jelly
• Collection of puzzles:  Tacoyaki simple rule flipping 2 color counter puzzle [Flash]; part of a large collection
• Loops of Zen: click puzzle [Flash]
• Gridlock -the Classic [Flash]
• Simon Taham's Puzzles: Loopy - constraint puzzle where you construct a path. Elegant, and transferrable to paper.
• Bojagi: divide a grid into rectangles of specific area.
• Make your own! Discovery Education's puzzlemaker includes math squares and number tile puzzles.
• Slanted at BrainBashers, which has many more types of puzzles.

Games

• Boolean Box - terrific introduction to boolean logic
• Eyemaze: Grow - amusing test of logic and experimentation. Maybe this is a puzzle? [Flash] 
• Gprime: Animal Maze Maker. My love of this game is inexplicable. [Flash]
• Guardian Rock - Indiana Jones vs the Boulder, and you are the boulder. 
• 2048, of course. Solar fusion variation. (H+H=He)
• Agar.io eat or be eaten
• Dots & Boxes. (Score and move again rules) 
• Maths Resources games: great collection of classics and new.
• A LaTeX game! TeXnique

Sources

• Reddit's r/mathpics

Stuff to Make

• Twine - choose-your-own-adventure type stories. You'll want philome.la for hosting if you do.
• Voxel - build 3-D images then output 3D printing code or nets to make.
• Mindmup - concept maps

People

• Jeff Week's Topology & Geometry collection
• Julie Wright's Puzzles and Games
• Tracy Johnston Zager's elementary review