cse4k12 ~ resources

Over Thanksgiving I started playing around with App Engine and threw together an a fairly simple app for keeping track of Computer Science (& Engineering) teaching resources.

I probably would have waited a bit before making it available, but with Computer Science Education Week going on right now, I figured that this was as good a time as any.

It's running at http://cse4k12.appspot.com/ and you can use it to search for resources by topic, add comments/reviews or you can add links to your own material.

It's still fairly early and I'm still going through and adding all the material that I'm aware of - I'll be adding it piece-by-piece as I get around to it. If you know of anything that is not listed, then please feel free to add it.

Authentication... sigh...

The thing that bugs me the most about it is that, while no login is required to access any content on the site, you do need to login in order to add resources or comments. This is to help prevent people from spamming the site with useless comments/advertisements.

I didn't want to force people to create yet another account/password just for this site, so you can use your Google account (gmail account) for authentication. And no, this doesn't mean that you give your password to us - what happens is that we send you to Google where you login and then they send back a token that says "the current user has successfully logged in as xxx@gmail.com". That's all we get: your email (well, and a "nickname"). Which is great because we don't really want or need anything else.

Of course, this doesn't help you if you don't already have a Google account. While it's easy to create one, you'd probably rather use your Passport or OpenID account or whatever it is you use on a day-to-day basis. I plan on adding support for these different authentication providers, but haven't had a chance to do it yet. Please let me know if you would find this useful so that I can prioritize adding support for this.