Who, when, where, why,

What is ToolBox?

What is ToolBox?

ToolBox is a collection of academic tools made with the purpose of executing algorithms, showing and visualising each step of the way, and explaining the rationale behind each step. As this website's solo developer doing my postgraduate in computer science, the tools I develop will primarily focus on university level computer science concepts and algorithms.

However, our goal is also to collaborate with the community to share what we know, so that ToolBox can become a reliable place for students or anyone in need of help. Hence, we may develop tools for algorithms outside of computer science, expectedly in fields in mathematics or other sciences. You can learn about how to

collaborate with us

here!

All tools and services our website provide will be free for now, and forever. Additionally, for the developers, our code will remain open source on our

GitHub.

What is the purpose of ToolBox?

Personal motivation

Before joining the job hunt in the software engineering field, it is in my best interest to develop a strong portfolio of programming projects before leaving uni. Having debated and tried some different ideas, ToolBox stood out as the project that suited me the most and is aligned with my passion in teaching, visualising concepts, and being of help to others.

Additionally, in order to be qualified in explaining concepts and developing tools that I am currently learning in my uni courses, I am therefore required to understand these concepts quite thoroughly myself. As such, I will have to procrastinate less (🙂) and put more effort into my current studies, which is obviously beneficial.

On a different note, I am an avid believer in the visualisation of concepts and problem solving and I don't believe there is enough of it in the available resources online, or even in many university courses I have attended. Therefore, this is another motivation that will be central to the development of any tool.

Values

As a student that has been through high school and an entire undergraduate degree, I understand the struggles when it comes to finding the right tools I need online. As such, I am dedicated to make tools up to my highest standard, which is based on the following values:

    Clear and concise working out:

    I believe that a correct understanding of the process is far more important than a correct answer! If you can only blindly follow an algorithm, what makes you different from some lines of code? Understanding the steps to solving any problem equips you with new interesting ways of approaching new problems. Eventually, facing new challenges will no longer feel like an impenetrable wall, but instead a game to figure out which tools will break that wall down, layer by layer.

    Visualisation of solutions:

    Everyone learns differently, and as for myself, I believe that visualisation of the solving process is often the best way to absorb content. As such, I aim to do my best to animate these tools with dynamic visualisations, making the diagrams change according to user inputs.

    Provision of proofs wherever applicable:

    Proofs have largely been taken for granted. When given a formula, I found it is rare for many students to think about why it works, let alone putting in the effort to research it online. I wish to encourage students to have the mindset of wanting to know why formulae work. As such, I aim to either provide proofs in the tools ourselves, or if there already exist such resources online, find and provide the best ones for you.

Our history

The development of ToolBox began in May, 2023. The project was initially a 2-person job with me and Harry, but since making the basic functionalities and layouts of the website, we were stuck with our old concept and explored other website ideas instead. Our initial goal with ToolBox was too far-fetched and involved developing tools for everything we have learned from high school to university. Around the start of 2024, I continued developing ToolBox with a reimagined purpose that almost entirely focuses on concepts that I am currently learning, this scale of work is much more realistic and manageable as a solo developer.

May - June 2023 - Developed the tools

Latex Converter

and

Maths Expression Parser

Dec 2023 - Jan 2024 - [UNSW COMP4418 Knowledge Representation] Written notes on Resource Allocation, exploring concepts of efficiency and fairness in allocation algorithms. Developed tools

EF1 allocation algorithm

and

Student Proposing Deferred Acceptance algorithm.

Meet the dev!

Developer - Daniel Song