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Technical Specification — What You Need To Make Boom Cards Work

There Are A Few Things That You Need To Do So That Boom Cards Will Work On Your Devices 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

There are just a few things you must have for Boom Cards to play properly:

  • An internet connection. 
  • A device with a currently supported operating system. For safety and security reasons, we do not support the use of Boom Cards on operating systems that have reached end-of-life as defined by their manufacturer.

Either

  • A modern browser such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Silk, or Opera on a Chromebook, laptop, desktop, phone, or tablet 
            OR

 

Allow List for Managed Devices and Networks

If your school or organization's network filters will only allow specified domains, please contact your IT department to Whitelist the following (these also need to be allowed inside your school's LMS system, being used for assignments and for browsers):

  • Cookies are served by https://wow.boomlearning.com in your browser cookie settings.
  • Authentication for Google and Microsoft users (if your school uses these)
  • Access to our Boom Learning apps (if you want to use native apps on your devices)

Your IT department may also need to allow the following domains:

 

Some users have had issues with Avast (or AVG, a subsidiary of Avast) Security flagging https://boom-cards.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ as a phishing URL. That URL is not a phish. That is the URL we use to fetch resources for our product. We are the ones who made the deliberate request to load the resource on the user's behalf.

For email networks that require an IP address, please allow this IP: 156.70.2.176

Custom VPN Settings (if applicable)

If your district or school uses a VPN in their network, there are some things that your IT might neeed to ensure Boom Cards can be used as expected. 

  1. Ensure WebSocket traffic to our domain is allowed without inspection, modification, or optimization (Inspection or optimization layers can interfere with small, periodic server-initiated keep-alive messages.)

  2. Disable SSL/TLS inspection or deep packet inspection for our site. (These features commonly disrupt or drop server-initiated control messages inside otherwise healthy WebSocket connections.)
  3. Disable traffic shaping or filtering rules that treat low-bandwidth or periodic traffic differently. (Keep-alive messages are small and regular, and are sometimes deprioritized or discarded by these policies.)
  4. Ensure bidirectional WebSocket communication is permitted even when the browser is not actively sending requests (The connection must remain valid during short periods of client-side inactivity.)

If you are a teacher and do not have access to these settings, please share these with your IT or network administrator. They should be familiar with these settings and should be able to update the district’s VPN configuration.

How to Whitelist Boom Emails

To ensure you receive our emails, including email confirmations or password reset links, please add the domain boomlearning.com and @boomlearning.com to your Allow List in your email. 

Here are a few external resources on how to add us to your allow list: 

If you are still not seeing emails you expect to see, please email us at Help@boomlearning.com so we can investigate. 

 

Compatible devices:

iPad or iPhone — the "Boom Cards" native app requires iOS 13 or later. 

Kindle Fire — the "Boom Cards" native app works with devices manufactured in 2022 or later. 

Android Chromebooks, phones, and tablets - the "Boom Cards" native app requires version 11 or later. 

Fire OS tablets - the Boom Cards native app requires Fire OS based on Android 11 or later (Kindle Fire 2022 models or newer). 

Devices running unsupported iOS, Android versions, or Kindle devices can still access Boom Cards using a web browser!

Interactive Whiteboards

Our users have had success with Boom Cards on:

  • GetClearTouch panels
  • SMARTBoards
  • ActivPanel

...and more. So long as the interactive whiteboard can interact with HTML5 browser apps, Boom Cards should work.

 

Teletherapy platforms

Our users who provide remote services have had success with

  • Zoom
  • Adobe Connect 
  • WebEx

 

Creating Boom Cards

You can only create Boom Cards in a browser, not an app. We find that laptops or desktops are best for creating Boom Cards.

Troubleshooting Page Refresh or Reset

Some users report experiencing page "refreshing" or "resetting". The behavior seen by a teacher or students could include:

  • Students deck plays, refreshing in the middle of a deck play.

  • Educators who keep a deck open in a browser, restarting.

This behavior has been discovered as a symptom of the user's  VPN or network settings. If you are a teacher and do not have access to these settings, please share this article with your IT or network administrator.

Here is an explanation for the techy-minded individuals:

Our application uses a long-lived, secure WebSocket connection between your browsers and our servers. During periods when the app is using local data, the browser does not send any requests to the server for lengthy stretches of time. To keep the connection healthy, the server sends small keep-alive messages to the browser and expects a quick acknowledgment to confirm that the user is still there.

On some school VPNs, these server-initiated keep-alive messages can be blocked, delayed, or deprioritized—even while normal application traffic continues to work. When that happens, the browser never receives the keep-alive message and therefore cannot respond. The server then assumes the connection has been lost and intentionally resets it, which appears to the user as a brief disconnect and  “refresh” in the browser.

The most effective way to resolve this is network-side configuration changes, particularly settings that affect server-initiated WebSocket traffic, such as one or more of the Custom VPN Settings listed above.