I just returned from a wonderful conference at Ithaca College that was the First North American Conference on GeoGebra, a wonderful Open Source Dynamic Geometry Software package that you can find online at www.geogebra.org. It has been around for a while, but it is only just getting well-known because it is free! It is also amazing because it is written in Java, so that you can easily export the ggb files and put them on web pages, so all you need to run them is a web browser. I am trying to start putting some on my web page, so if you have time, look under the technology page and check in there. I made one that does a wonderful square to rectangle puzzle with a friend named Mark Sawula and an expert named Mike May. I also did another that shows that the sum of the residuals of a data set to the best fit line is zero – you can move the points around and everything.

Anyway, the best part about this conference was how wonderful and open all of the attendees were. It was probably the first conference where the researchers, teachers, professors, graduate students and developers of the software were all working together as equals and I loved the atmosphere. I thought it was amazing, and highly recommend the conference next June 2011 to everyone. Keep you eye out for announcements.