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Introducing Kids Map It


Bright Rain Solutions and I put together a fun little project called Kids Map It in our spare time and we’d be glad if you took a peek at it and let us know what you think. Please spread the word about if you think it could be useful for the little ones in your lives or in educational programs that you help with.

Warning: It might go down. It’s on a free instance. It’ll be upgraded to handle more traffic if that becomes a problem–and what a nice problem it would be.

***For now the site is best viewed on a largish screen, not a small netbook screen or phone.***

Screenshot of Kids Map It

Goal: Our goal was to make something so easy that the youngest could use it (drag and drop!) but with a detailed enough map for everyone’s needs. It’s bright, but not garish, and intentionally devoid of the complexity of other sites. We had one job! (And hopefully achieved it though feature enhancements are in the works.)

Caveat: It’s early days on this so please let us know what needs to be better!

Specs:

  • collaboration made possible by GitHub
  • jswizardry via JQuery, OpenLayers 3
  • use of icons by flaticon — we’ll add more soon
  • customization of a free bootstrap template called Grayscale by startbootstrap
  • styling of basemap coded in MapBox Studio and map hosting via same
  • served up via AWS free tier–if it breaks, that’s why :)

Edited to add more unexpected uses:


 

This entry was posted on June 9, 2015, 4:54 pm and is filed under Education, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  1. #1 by Nathan Saylor on June 10, 2015 - 6:53 am

    Here’s what I came up with. pic.twitter.com/ZDM8RaTeKN
    The kid trying to drown his little brother took a while because I couldn’t undo where I put the head and had to keep starting over.
    Also, printing stretches the map instead of keeping the size ratio constant.
    Nice job! I’ll be sharing it with my kids!

  2. #2 by Nathan Saylor on June 10, 2015 - 6:54 am

  3. #3 by G.P. on June 10, 2015 - 7:16 am

    Ha ha ha. Love it! We’re planning an export to pdf feature that should make printing better!

  4. #4 by G.P. on June 10, 2015 - 8:17 am

    The link from Nathan isn’t working for everyone so let’s try this one.

Comments are closed.