Tumble Together is a web-based emulator for the Turing Tumble marble-powered mechanical computer to help build, test and share designs. Tumble Together allows users to quickly share challenges and solutions, and is a useful companion for using the Turing Tumble to teach kids about computer science. It can be used to share challenges and solutions as a URL, and to collaborate on shared boards in real time.
A full version with collaborative boards (with up to 10 simultaneous rooms) is available to try on Heroku. A static version that only runs on the client side can be found on GitHub Pages.
I made Tumble Together to continue playing with this awesome marble powered mechanical computer remotely with my nephew during the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Simulation of the Turing Tumble, with animated marbles and parts.
- Collaborate live on a shared board, solving problems together.
- Sharable URLs for solutions or challenges of your own design.
- Works on touch screen devices and is fully responsive at various screen sizes. Simply click/touch and drag parts in to place.
- First 30 puzzles from the puzzle book ready to load and solve.
- Node
- Express
- Socket.io
- Svelte.js
With Node.js installed clone or download the repository, navigate to the base folder and run the following commands:
$ npm install
$ npm run build
To start the Express server with the ability to work together live on the same board run:
$ npm run start
Or, to just run the client side app locally run:
$ npm run local
To run on any web server you can just clone or download the static branch (which is used to deploy to GitHub Pages) and use the files stored there.