Magformers (magnetic building sets involving maths) used to be Simon’s greatest passion when he was six (just a year ago!) and this week he has been travelling in time to revisit this old love, after his little sis received a new Magformers set as a present. What Simon did next was to combine Magformers and programming: he created an automatic table listing various Magformers models (in HTML/ JavaScript). The sets that can be used to build those models were to get filled in automatically, depending on the number of specific shapes needed for every model and the number of such shapes available in every set. As you might imagine, this involved many lines of code and a whole lot of computational thinking. At one point, when Simon was nearly done, he realized that the column listing the sets wouldn’t get filled in properly. He had a bug in his program that he couldn’t find, so he turned to his older friends in Slack for help. It’s such a pleasure to see him communicate with these experienced programmers on a regular basis now and unbelievable how eager and resourceful they are. One of Simon’s friends from Slack even created his own version of Simon’s program in CodePen! What makes it even more wonderful is that Simon no longer hesitates to apply the good advice he gets. The next day he wrote some “helper functions” and the table worked!
Simon hasn’t put this project online yet, as he wanted to make it more interactive and hasn’t managed to do that so far.
Geeks out of the box 
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