Before there were the continents, there was Pangea. Two hundred million years ago, the enormous land mass began to break apart and we’ve been separated ever since — but a map tool can help you find where a given town would have been on the supercontinent.
This ancient earth tool is a rotating view of the world at various points in time. You can select the time period (“what did the Earth look like 750 million years ago?”) or search by event, such as “first multicellular life” or “first insects.” To figure out where you would have lived on Pangea, input your address and select “Pangea supercontinent” from the options on the far right.
My hometown in California, as it turns out, was still a coast. But my current location in New York was on a strip of land that had the northeastern US (obviously) on one side, and Morocco on the other.
If stepping through time isn’t enough, the Antipodes map lets you input a location and find the exact other location on Earth. The antipode of my location in New York is some water near Australia, while the antipode of my hometown is… some water near the southern tip of Africa. But the antipode of the hospital where I was born, in central China, is a place in northern Argentina. That’s more like it.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
