![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm looking for a magical piece of (free as in beer) software that someone in the universe must have written, so I figured I'd ask around to see if anyone knows of such a thing. Here's the idea:
I'm thinking about reorganizing the topics in our two year introductory physics sequence for physics majors. (I may discuss the specifics eventually, but they aren't important here: one big goal is to make the early classes more interesting to potential majors.) As part of the process, I'm going to have a list of topics and the estimated weeks of class time required for each one. I'll want to muck around with their order while shuffling them between semester sized boxes.
I can do this in plain text or a spreadsheet, but it strikes me that it would be wonderful to have a graphical tool to do this sort of thing. I'm imagining being able to drag and drop blocks of defined size between various lists or from position to position within each list. Nice but optional features might include nested items (topics and sub-topics, that could be moved either as a group or independently), dependency tracking (when a topic relies on knowledge from earlier material), and anything else that would make the process easier but I haven't thought of. :)
It's pretty clear to me that using a whole fancy program for this is massive overkill, which is why I'm not willing to write one myself (or put much time into learning something complicated). In fact, I could probably just repurpose the user interface in various unrelated software (maybe sound or video editing?) to do what I want. So, any suggestions?
I'm thinking about reorganizing the topics in our two year introductory physics sequence for physics majors. (I may discuss the specifics eventually, but they aren't important here: one big goal is to make the early classes more interesting to potential majors.) As part of the process, I'm going to have a list of topics and the estimated weeks of class time required for each one. I'll want to muck around with their order while shuffling them between semester sized boxes.
I can do this in plain text or a spreadsheet, but it strikes me that it would be wonderful to have a graphical tool to do this sort of thing. I'm imagining being able to drag and drop blocks of defined size between various lists or from position to position within each list. Nice but optional features might include nested items (topics and sub-topics, that could be moved either as a group or independently), dependency tracking (when a topic relies on knowledge from earlier material), and anything else that would make the process easier but I haven't thought of. :)
It's pretty clear to me that using a whole fancy program for this is massive overkill, which is why I'm not willing to write one myself (or put much time into learning something complicated). In fact, I could probably just repurpose the user interface in various unrelated software (maybe sound or video editing?) to do what I want. So, any suggestions?
Tags: