Tableaunoir

https://tableaunoir.github.io/

Tableaunoir is an online collaborative blackboard tool with fridge magnets available in many languages. "Tableau noir" means blackboard in French. Contrary to plenty of other collaborative boards on the Internet, with Tableaunoir you can create interactive animations via the use of fridge magnets. The full documentation is available here.

Screenshots

Tableaunoir has been designed to give lectures. Tableaunoir enables to easily divide your board in panels and navigate panel by panel.

Screenshot of tableaunoir showcasing a course using colors etc

A small gif video showcasing the use of tableaunoir in a course on breadth-first search

Tableaunoir offers magnets, like fridge magnets. They are small images, numbers, texts. The user can add/move/delete magnets to create animations. The screenshot below shows the use of magnets when teaching algorithms in a computer science curriculum. In the examples below, magnets data in some data structure, nodes in some graph, etc.

Screenshot of tableaunoir showcasing the latest toolbar, magnets, texts etc

Features

We list the main features of Tableaunoir.

Of course, you can draw and erase, with your mouse or a graphic tablet. You can draw shapes.
Collaborate edit the same board at the same time (need a server for that),
does not require an account
Backgrounds: staffs for teaching music, grid, images and PDF documents
You can also use kind of predefined fridge magnets that you can move on the board, to make animation e.g. for illustrating sorting algorithms, graphs algorithms etc (and even playing Go!).
Create your own fridge magnets for interactive courses, by importing any image, or by transforming a part of the board (Ctrl + X).
Color palette for chalk (c, 7 colors black/white , yellow , orange , blue , red , pink , green ),
Draw interative graphs : vertices are magnets, labels of vertices and edges are handwritten but are updated when vertices are moved,
Change the color of magnets' background,
Load/Save the current board,
Export in PNG or PDF,
Add texts (Enter and type), and move texts. Supports LaTeX (using MathJax)!
Switch to a whiteboard instead of a blackboard,
Change from right-handed (default) to left-handed cursor,
Divide yourboard in half. Ideal for teaching. Add as many new half-board as you need, going right with → and then left/right with ←/→ keyboard arrows,

You can teach online by sharing the screen with Discord, Zoom, Teams, etc, or by sharing a link (need a server for that).

Videos

Video in english: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtLaNBOuSHc]
First video in french: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6_lhqiPBow]

Examples of use

Give a lecture

Tableaunoir is used for teaching at ENS Rennes. The main advantage is that, by hiding the toolbar, the screen is fully black: there are no buttons that annoy or distract the students (in my personal use, I simply hide the toolbar). Tableaunoir is controlled by a graphic tablet and by the keyboard of the computer (7 keys!). It makes it very interactive compared to fixed slides.

A photo showcasing the use of tableaunoir in a real course taught in an amphitheater (1/3)

Share ideas

An idea to explain and share? Tableaunoir enables to write together on shared collaborative boards.

Draw pictures

Tableaunoir can simply be used to draw pictures: [https://team.inria.fr/erable/en/marie-france-sagot/blog/silly-things/]

Make slides for videos or presentation

Tableaunoir can also be used to build slides. See the documentation.

Commands for the Tableaunoir project

remove all node_modules and install back again

npm ci

Build everything to dist

npm run build

See linter warning/errors

npm run lint

Starts a local node server

npm run serve

Offline version

If you prefer to use an offline version, it is possible. You have to install Electron and then the application can be launched as follows (from the main directory):

$ electron mainElectron.js

Create your own tableaunoir server

In order to share blackboards, you need a server. For installing the server:

In the server, first git clone (and then later git pull) the project.
Modify the src/config.js.
Compile Tableaunoir (see above)
Install Apache HTTPD to deploy dist/index.html (other web servers might work too, but have not been tested).
Configure the server part, see server/README.md.
Then server/run.sh.

License

This software is open-source under the GPLv3.0 license.

Credits

Thank you to all contributors. Also thank you for your support. Please find the list of the source of the images.

Some pictures come from @nicholas-ochoa/OpenSC2K, an open-source clone of Sim City 2000.
[https://openmoji.org/]
Some CC0 icons from [https://www.svgrepo.com/]
The sound of the chalk comes from [https://lasonotheque.org/detail-0541-craie-sur-tableau-noir.html]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Icon_pdf_file.svg]
[https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1057578]