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.

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

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.

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, or any background color
• 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,
• Make slides, record animations. This can be used to prepare slides for a talk or for a video.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

npm ci

npm run build

npm run lint

npm run serve

If you prefer to use an offline version, it is possible. You have to install Electron. Make sure to have compiled the project with npm run build. Then the application can be launched as follows (from the main directory):

$ electron mainElectron.js

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.

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

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]