BrowseRight is an iPad app for teaching students to be responsible digital citizens. Students read short lessons and then complete quizzes to prove their learning.
BrowseRight can be used by schools to educate students and to help satisfy CIPA law requirements mandating that schools teach students about digital citizenship.
Apps are available for the following platforms:
- iPad (app store)
The website can be viewed at browseright.org.
BrowseRight consists of two main parts:
- A server web application written using the Grails web framework
- A series of device-specific applications (currently only available for the iPad) written primarily in JavaScript using the PhoneGap app framework.
We use a lot of JavaScript libraries in our client applications, the primary ones being jQuery and jQuery UI (not
jQuery Mobile). Many others are also used (see the js/lib folder).
Download and install the version of Grails used for the server app (currently 2.3.3). It should build without any
additional configuration. Use grails run-app for testing on your machine and grails war to create a WAR file to
deploy to a Java application server.
When running in the production environment, the JDBC URL, username, and password are read from the following
environment variabes:
JDBC_URLJDBC_USERNAMEJDBC_PASSWORD
(right now only MySQL is supported but it should be very simple to support other databases, potentially by moving the driver to an environment variable)
To add admin users (users that are able to edit content via the web interface), add environment variables in the following format:
export BROWSERIGHT_ADMIN_TEST='$2a$10$W5oU6LKLmvY6EVcJrrpryuQyWVlxUmc/KZ4tGwc7zm9tNL81laPNS'
(for user "test", case insensitive, value is the bcrypt-hashed password, in this case "test")
This requires you to run OS X due to the closed nature of the iOS development platform.
This is trickier because you need an Apple iOS developer account (USD$100/year) to run BrowseRight on your own device. You can, however, test with the iOS simulator.
We can't share our developer certificates/keys, but will use them to build all official releases of BrowseRight, so feel free to make changes and submit a pull request.
BrowseRight contains a number of articles and quizzes. These are all available under the MIT license (as is our code), but are not currently in the repository.
We welcome contributions both to our codebase (improving the app(s) or server), and to our content!
Because of the nature of the App Store, creating a competing fork can be problematic. Because of this, we strongly encourage you not to create a competing fork of BrowseRight (unless you want to take it in a completely different direction) and instead to submit a pull request or open an issue with your changes.
You are free to create a competing fork (our code is released under the MIT license), but we believe it would be beneficial for you to instead work with us to improve the app. We'd love to include your changes!
If you do decide to create a competing fork, I think you will probably have to change the name from "BrowseRight" and change all of the graphics in order for it to be accepted by Apple.
Frankly, there aren't a lot of open-source apps on the App Store, so there isn't much precedent to go on. We just think it would generally be beneficial to everyone to only have one copy of BrowseRight on the App Store.
By competing fork I mean forking the project, making changes, and then submitting your fork to the App Store.
BrowseRight is copyright © 2013 Chris Kuehl and Caleb Dotson, with original code and images released under an MIT
license. See LICENSE for details.