Ancient Web: Math Cats Made a 2000 Browser Into a Playful Math Workbench

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Not every old mathematics site tried to explain a theorem. Some gave children a box of shapes and asked what they could make by clicking around.

Explore Math Cats' OBBL Architecture Blocks.

Math Cats is associated with educator Wendy Petti and an old style of small, browser-based mathematical experiments. Its main address did not load reliably during this review, but a number of individual pages remain indexed. That limits what can be said about the current homepage, while preserving enough material to examine one particularly revealing experiment.

The OBBL Architecture Blocks activity credits Spanish architect Maurici Carbó Jordi with the original idea and Petti with the Math Cats adaptation. Its footer dates their collaboration to 2000.

When compatibility was part of the lesson

OBBL lets learners choose an architectural shape and place copies on a drawing board. Rather than snapping obediently into a static diagram, the blocks are designed to move. Icons offer a thumbtack, a raindrop, an eraser, and other controls. Visitors can use the combinations to explore patterns, pictures, and spatial reasoning.

The instructions warn that the activity may need time to load. They even offer a special Stone Age OBBL for users running Netscape 4.7 or earlier. That line captures an educational technology transition: the developer had to support children using very different browsers and machines, sometimes with incompatible interactive capabilities.

The page thanks Carbó Jordi and links messages between him and Petti about how their collaboration worked. It also points to the architect's separate Nummolt website. In other words, the learning activity preserved evidence of its own making, not just a finished animation.

A later spreadsheets resource by Petti extends the same spirit to spreadsheet puzzles, number exploration, and downloadable classroom files. It includes Excel examples and a numerical puzzle whose answer unlocks another workbook. The two projects are from different years, not a single 2000 release.

Because the main site and some interactive tools could not be tested here, a surviving activity description should not be mistaken for proof that every animation still runs. But the underlying approach remains legible: hands-on mathematical discovery, shared across personal educational webpages, with browser limitations written into the instructions.

Read the preserved OBBL activity description.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.