We've just finished our video tutorial for the Virtual Classroom. If you are a teacher (or parent) interested in using the virtual classroom features with your students, but aren't sure how to get started, this 7 minute video gives you the basics.

Virtual Classroom Video Tutorial

The video does not cover content creation (creating reference units, problems, quizzes, word games, and mazes). We hope to add those tutorials in the coming months. In the meantime, you can always use the context help in the Pro Control Panel to get started with content creation.

Wow! This month has shown the highest level of game play we have ever seen for the month of July! (July is typically the lowest game play month of the year, because everyone is so busy with swimming, hiking, camping, exploring, family vacationing and all the typical summer activities that keep people from game play online!)

What's even more impressive is that game play for the month of July this year has been even higher than the month of June this year, and June is typically significantly higher than July (school is in session for at least a couple weeks of June, in most places!).

What we're finding is that although we don't have significantly more visitors on the new version of the site (though that's on the rise too!), on average our visitors are staying longer, and visiting more pages, and playing more games before they leave.

I know I've said it before, but THANK YOU to all of the many members and visitors who took the time to try the development version and give valuable feedback during the months leading up to the changeover at the beginning of July. It is, in great part, thanks to you that the new version is so much more easy to use, attractive, and enticing to visitors.

And thank you, also, to the many game players who didn't see the notices asking them to try the new versions of the games, but still offered gracious and helpful suggestions once the new version was live!

Pro Problems

Currently we're developing the "Pro Problems" section of the site (Pro Problems). A few of our pro members are busily writing math problems for their students for the coming year, and the pro problem section is growing steadily as a result.

We realized that the directory structure is a bit faulty, for two reasons:

1. It is not well enough organized to conveniently categorize all the math topics in the high school curriculum
2. It doesn't give us opportunity to expand into other subject areas, such as Physics or Chemistry.

Accordingly, we are working at redesigning the directory structure, to more closely align our organization with the educational standards most teachers will be familiar with, while developing a Physics directory to go alongside the math directory.

At some point soon, we will be temporarily shutting down the pro problems section (not in the pro control panel, but on the main site) while we re-connect all the problems to their new directory structure.

This will likely happen sometime between 3 and 6 o'clock, EST, sometime in the next two or three days. So if you're on early in the morning (or if you're in European/Asian countries later in the day!), you may see the Pro Problems temporarily vanish.

Don't worry - they'll be back!

Pro Membership and Virtual Classroom

We've had to temporarily suspend the ability to sign up for pro membership and virtual classroom, because we are still tweaking the new version of the Virtual Classroom, and we don't want new teachers to be confused by the changing landscape of features while we do the last bit of debugging and tweaking. (See the Pro Member Forum to find out about some of the tweaks we're working on!)

We anticipate that the ability to sign up for Pro Membership and Virtual Classroom will be reinstated around first of August. Watch this space for more details!

I'd like to begin this morning with a huge thanks to those of you who have provided valuable feedback on the new version of the site. This morning a special thanks goes to Geoff, and to Sue; both of these puzzle players have helped us puzzle out some of the bugs in the daily section of the site.

Thanks to their observations, several bugs have been fixed, and significant improvements have been made on some of the games.  We still have features to add, and bugs to fix; we're working on these!

Snowflake Maker

One of the features we didn't have time to finish before the changeover was the Snowflake Maker. The new version of this game has some significant improvements and added features over the old one.  Here are some things you'll notice when you try the snowflake maker:

• You can now choose different types of symmetry.  Click one of the shapes at the top of the page to choose any symmetry from triangular to nonagonal.  Hexagonal is the default.
• The snowstorms you create won't just appear on a black background; there is a "time of day" feature which cycles between day and night.  This makes things more interesting for you as you design your snowflakes, since, depending on the mix of dark and light colors you use, you can make the snowflake look vastly different in the daytime than it does at night.
• If you want to, you can use different colors, not just shades of gray. Use the intensity, brightness and hue selectors to fine tune your color selections.
• We've put a symmetry template on the canvas, to help you orient yourself when you start drawing.

Here's the link to the snowflake maker. Snowflake Maker. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Don't want to make a snowflake? Click here to get a random snowstorm.

This morning at about 3:15 EST we directed the domain name theproblemsite.com to its new hosting space. Over the course of the next 24 hours, more and more visitors will get that updated location in their browser and find the new site. 

WELCOME!

This has been a whirlwind of activity the last couple months trying to get everything ready for the change, and we've definitely felt "under the gun," as the site had clearly outgrown its old hosting space, and crashes were getting more and more frequent.

In the end, we realized the following:

1. We're losing traffic because of the down-time on the old server.
2. We wanted the whole summer for people to try out the games and give us more feedback, before school starts and the students start hitting the games
3. There's no better time to make the change than 4th of July weekend, since this is (historically) the second lowest traffic time of the year, and we wanted to have as little interruption as possible for our visitors.

So, even though we felt rushed, and feel like there are still things we could improve in the user experience, we made the decision to surge forward and get the change made.

Will you find bugs?  Undoubtedly! The entire site was rebuilt from the ground up. Unlike our last update, which was simply "tweaking" existing code, this new version is probably 98% new coding. Having rebuilt the entire site from the ground up, with reference pages, quizzes, printable worksheets, and about 50 games, there are sure to be glitches that haven't been discovered yet.

Tell Us About the Bugs?

There's a community forum on the site (look for the "Forum" link at the top of the page, where you can share information about bugs you find.  Or you can directly email the site admin at dtwitchell@virtu-software.com.

A Huge Thank You!

A huge thank you goes to some of our members who faithfully tried the new games as they appeared, and reported bugs they found. There are too many to list them all, but I'm especially grateful to dkh and danerd for input on Trio Match, and dkh's input on Diamond Slide, as well as Yoda's input and suggestions on Adders. 

We look forward to hearing from many of you what you like and don't like about the new site.

Happy Puzzling!
Douglas Twitchell
TPS Admin

All but three of the games (Spy Chess, Fizziks, and Snowflake Maker) have been converted over to the new version.  All of the reference units are online (but not thoroughly proofread).  The quizzes are online, the Printables are online (with the exception of many mazes which have not been set up on the new site).  We don't have instructions in place for the new versions of the games.

We have a lot left to do.  Nevertheless, our goal is to have the new site LIVE over the weekend of July 4th.  Why?  Because it's the second lowest traffic weekend of the year (Christmas is first, of course!).  Thus, if there are glitches in the switchover process, it'll affect the least number of people.

Also, since it's the beginning of the summer, it gives us a couple months to tweak things before school is in session again!

This means the next week and a half are going to be very busy for us.  

It also means that if you have some bug reports that you haven't told us about, now is the time to share them!

Thanks so much for all the help you've provided!