Migration Complete?

As you may or may not know, The Problem Site is in the process of moving to a new server this week. (Read previous entries for details on why this is happening!)

So the question of the day is: Are you looking at the old version of the site, or the new one?

Good question. And here's how you can tell which version you're looking at. If you were at The Problem Site and you got to this blog by clicking an image that looked like this:



Or you got here by clicking a link that looked like this: TPS Blog, that means you are on the new version of the site. Congratulations. As you browse The Problem Site, you will see that there are many many resources hosted within this site. As you might imagine, moving all the games, resource pages, and miscellaneous stuff to an entirely new platform was a daunting task.

And it was all done in a period of just a few short days.

Which means there is the potential that something doesn't work right. Some game that won't load, or won't play properly, or some resource page that doesn't properly load. I sincerely hope that there aren't any pages like that, but I won't know for sure until I've received feedback from the site's visitors.

That's you!

So, as you visit this site, play the games, and try out the other resources, if you stumble across any problems, please use the contact page to drop me a note telling me exactly what went wrong. If you received one of those dreaded error messages, please copy the text of the error message into your note.

Only you can prevent forest fires, and only you can report the errors you see!

Thanks for your patience during this migration process. And have fun at The Problem Site!

The Treasure Hunt - Confounding Members Daily!

So what is this Treasure Hunt? It's a series of seven mysterious riddles, plus a final challenge to solve, in order to gain a prize. It's one of the new puzzles/games that was added to The Problem Site in the last few months. When I created the puzzle, I expected people would enjoy it - what I didn't expect was the volume of people who kept coming back again and again to try to solve the puzzles. If you look at the Statistics Page, you can see how many people (on average) join the quest each day. At the time of writing this post, that average is 22 new members each day.

The other thing I didn't expect was how many of those members would be completely confounded by the riddles. Since the game was posted back in October of 2005, only a handful (I think 4 or 5) members have actually made it all the way through the puzzle from start to finish. What is the hangup? The hangup is the very last riddle. "Odds And Ends" is the name of the riddle, and it is somewhat mathematical in nature. Although it is also fairly "graphical" in nature as well (yes, you can consider that a bit of a hint!)

And, if you want another hint, consider this: the answer to the last riddle is very short, and one of the people who was able to solve the puzzle solved it by guessing. Not bad...using his guessing method, he was guaranteed to get the right answer in less than 27 guesses. Hmm...

Of course, if you waste that many guesses on a single puzzle, you might regret it when you get to the final challenge!

Okay, that's enough hinting around...

If you are an elementary school teacher, and you are thinking of having your class participate in The Treasure Hunt, you should try the puzzles first yourself! Some of these puzzles are solvable by elementary students, but several are more likely to be solved by high school students or adults.

High school students with well developed problem solving skills and a strong determination to succeed will get enjoy pitting their insight and intuition against this devious puzzle.

What Happened To The Problem Pages?

What happened to the Problem Of The Week Pages? That's a good question! Initially, The Problem Site was designed specifically for Problem Of The Week and Problem Of The Month Pages. Students (and adults too!) could visit the site each week and get a new problem, solve it, and then submit their solution for grading. The Problem Moderator would review their solution, reply with comments and grade them on their solution. A high score list would show how returning members were doing from week to week.

But now those pages (found here: Problem Pages) are displaying no new problems. So what happened? Well, those pages were hosted by four different people, and at various points over the last couple years, we got distracted by other things, and found it was a great deal of work to post new problems each week/month. Part of the problem was, those problem pages were some of the very first web pages I ever designed, so they were not the easiest to manage!

So my goal this school year was, after updating the site appearance and layout (done) and after adding several new games (also done), I would tackle a complete overhaul of the Problem Pages. My goal was to have them back online by February, 2006.

So what happened?

Early on in 2006, I learned that The Problem Site was going to have to be migrated to a new server. As it turns out, this is a very positive move, and the new version of the Problem Pages will be much more robust and stable because of the move. But in the meantime, I decided it would be unwise to tackle the redesign before the site migration happened. Which means, of course, it'll probably work out that the new version is online just in time for the end of school.

Good timing, Doug!

So, in reality, what you can expect is that the Problem Pages will be back online for the 2006-2007 school year.

From The Beginning To The Present

After many years online, I've decided it's high time for The Problem Site to have its own blog. So let me begin by giving a brief history of the site.

The site started with a very small idea - a Problem Of The Week page, hosted at Virtu Software. The page became quite popular in a short period of time, and I began to think it would be nice to have an entire site dedicated to weekly and monthly math problems. Thus, The Problem Site was born. It began with a weekly math problem, a weekly brainteaser, and a monthly math problem at a more difficult level. The monthly problem was posted each month by Graeme McRae, who did a great job writing problems. All his problems can still be found here: High School Math Problems.

Eventually I had the bright idea of adding some educational games to the site, but my intent was that these would be a "secondary" part of the site. Hangman, NullGee, One-to-Ten, and others were added.

For a period of two or three years I became very busy with other things, and hardly even looked at The Problem Site. Then, about a year and a half ago, I was astounded to look at some statistics and discover that I was getting several hundred of visitors each day, browsing the math problems, and playing the games. Now that "several hundred" has turned into a couple thousand, and still rising. When I discovered that school websites all over the world were sending their students to The Problem Site during their free time, I decided it was time to add more features to the site. Thus, the site was redesigned, and many new games added.

The problem and brainteaser section of the site is the last to get an overhaul, as it needs the greatest amount of work. I hope to have these pages back online by the beginning of the 2006-2007 school year.

And that brings me to the present. This has been a bit of a stressful week. Since the beginning, The Problem Site has been hosted with a company called Ready Hosting. For years we have had virtually no problems there, and the hosting has been quite satisfactory. However, the company just came under new management, and everything has been falling apart. They insisted on migrating this site to new servers by the end of this week, even though we all (including them) know that their new servers were unstable. So I gave them an ultimatum of sorts - if you want the site moved by April 1st, you must have your server problems resolved by March 27th.

Didn't happen.

So The Problem Site is joining in the exodus from RH - from the sounds of things, The Problem Site is not the only rat fleeing this sinking ship. But, of course, moving the site to a new server can result in all kinds of problems, and with more than 23 different educational games, as well as many resource and informational pages, this could be a horribly daunting task.

Because of the move, the site now has access to a more powerful database platform, so I'm working through each of the games, converting everything to the new platform. If all goes well, we won't see even a moment of downtime, and everything will continue even better than before! Stay tuned...