The Vax Game is back!

[stemcodingohio]

Hi all,

I am not a member of the Salathe group. We had been using vax.herokuapp.com in Ohio as part of a math initiative when the site went down. For a while we used a backup version on web.archive.org but some districts block that site.

There was some funding so I asked web developer Kaden Mull (http://github.com/kmull99) to refactor the code so that it no longer required ruby on rails and that one could potentially host it without paying any server fees (and because the database feature wasn't really used). Removing ruby on rails (not because it was bad but because it wasn't absolutely necessary) also has the advantage that the site is less sensitive to version updates and changes in the browser, etc. In other words, the simpler the code the easier it is to keep it working in the long term and the code is now substantially simplified. We did not change any details of the game itself. The behavior is still as close to the original version as we could get.

Here is a link to the working vax game:

http://stemcodingohio.github.io/vaxgame/

The code is available here:

https://github.com/stemcodingohio/stemcodingohio.github.io/tree/main/vaxgame

I indicate in the readme there that the code was developed by Salathe and collaborators and that it is on a creative commons license (as it was originally released). All you have to do to get a mirror of http://stemcodingohio.github.io/vaxgame/ running is to copy all the files in the directory above to a new location (for example on your own github pages site). You can potentially modify the code if there is something you think could be improved -- just remember to acknowledge that the code was originally developed by Salathe and collaborators.

I will continue to keep http://stemcodingohio.github.io/vaxgame/ there for as long as github pages remains free.

Thank you again to Salathe and collaborators for all your hard work. A big thanks to Kaden Mull for refactoring the code. Kaden is a freelance software developer so please feel free to reach out to him if you are looking to hire someone for a project.

best,
Chris Orban
[email protected]