Create Animated Simulations With Loopy

Loopy is a free tool for creating your own animated simulations or illustrations of a concept. This free animation tool is designed to showing relationships between two or more parts of a system. It's perfect for showing cause and effect or for showing a workflow system.

To create an animation on Loopy you simply have to click on the blank canvas to place a circle that represents the start of a system. Then click on the canvas again to add another element to your system animation. To connect the two (or more) pieces you use a drawing tool to connect them. Once you've drawn the connections you can add cause and effect commands by selecting them from the Loopy editor.

Applications for Education
It took me a few minutes of playing around and remixing existing simulations to get the hang of how Loopy worked. Once I had it figured out, I quickly saw the potential for Loopy animations to help students understand how systems work. Give your students some time to use Loopy and they could create animations to illustrate their understanding of cause and effect relationships in science and engineering.

Chrome Tip - Quickly Hide or Show Bookmarks

In a webinar I recently hosted I incidentally showed a quick way to show or hide the bookmarks bar in Chrome. The webinar was not about Chrome or anything Google-related so I was surprised when someone asked me to show the trick again. There is not a trick, just hit CTRL+Shift+B to show or hide the bookmarks bar. Watch my video below to see the tip in action.