I teach IB physics at an international school. My school has just told me that our 1-1 laptop programme is switching from Windows laptops to Chromebooks at the start of the next school year.
I am trying to find a video analysis solution for my students to use in lab projects -- is there any way to run Tracker on a Chromebook? I don't see anything about Chromebooks on the website but thought I would double-check.
I'd also love to hear any suggestions or tips about cool things that can be done with Chromebooks for physics teaching.
Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions. Wendy McRae
Tracker does not work on chromebooks. I have been looking for something comparable for over a year. If anyone else has found something please let us know.
This software is great. I have done some photogrammetry research before teaching and would really like to use this tool in my classroom. A colleague told me that there is a cheap software from Vernier for iPhones which you could check out until the chromebook conundrum is solved.
I don't have a chromebook handy, but I believe it could be run by using Crouton and virtual booting linux. YMMV!
Hi, if you still haven't found anything, I am working on making an open source online version of Tracker, which would run on Chromebooks. Let me know if you're interested, I can send you a link to the GitHub. I'm creating it for my senior project at my high school, so it should be released in a usable form by early September. If you wanted to help by providing feedback/ideas, that'd be awesome. It will only be basic tracking at first, not really any of the fancier stuff which Tracker does (auto tracking, etc).
Re: Re: Re: Re: Can I run Tracker on a Chromebook? -
jan wieczorek
1 Posts
I noticed your live version went down and that perhaps some of the features are no longer working, at least for me. Do you realize this product would pay for your college if you hosted it and simply had ads on the website? I am sure THOUSANDS of physics teachers around the world would use it.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Can I run Tracker on a Chromebook? -
Luca Demian
1 Posts
Sorry about that, it should be back up now. Feel free to shoot me an email if you run into any more problems or have suggestions for the app: jstrack.luca (at) gmail. Also re ads, I don't think it would be in the mission of the software to make money off it, especially because hosting costs are minimal (it is entirely client-side). As an open source project based off of the open source Tracker software, I would feel wrong trying to monetize it.
Just tested it out and your app works brilliantly--no Java, no Flash, nothing else required but a modern browser--very nice!!!
Integration with Google Drive is genius--then students can film in slow motion with their phones at 120 or 240 frames per second (which used to require special grants to be written to purchase high speed cameras!) to do some truly cool video analysis in the classroom!
The data can be easily exported to Excel or copy and pasted into Google Sheets for graphing and analysis--thank you!
Looks like the only feature left would be if you could integrate graphing into your app so that the "visual" nature of the motion matching the motion graphs would be available like in Tracker...but I know that would take a lot more coding....
Either way, thank you for sharing your great work with the education community and we plan on trying to use your tool with our students and will share feedback!
Aside from development of a WebApp deployment you should check out RollApp which is a service for hosting standalone programs on commercial operating systems. As a demo they host free linux applications and one I suggested last year: Tracker is supported. I have used it in a limited way but it reads files from Google Drive or DropBox and will open analyze and save the .trk and trz files directly to cloud storage. Of course the RollApp folks want to make some $ so I don't know how long the app will be supported for free but for now it seems to work.
