WebMath: Survey

[Paul Libbrecht]

Guillermo Alzuru wrote:
> For years we (the Web Instructional Development department at University of
> Georgia) have been creating equations using MATHTYPE to create the MATHML
> code, then WebEQ to create applets. But it was not possible to truly test
> students ability to solve math problems because they couldn't enter
> equations, so all our tests were multiple choice, matching, etc, where you
> actually provide the choices and all they had to do was pick the answers.
> 
> Recently WebCT included an equation editor which should allow students to
> enter equations, which should be a great solution to this problem, but we're
> hesitant to use it until it doesn't get a lot better and proves to work well.
> 
> I was wondering what other people at other institutions are doing to allow
> students to answer questions by entering equations and solving problems step
> by step.

Guillermo,

Dare I mention ActiveMath (http://www.activemath.org/) ?

We don't have the solution for a real user-friendly formula input yet... 
but we hope that it will come within a year or two (among others, it 
should allow copy-and-paste from content, and store "content"-markup, 
e.g. OpenMath or MathML).

Currently, as many other systems, we require exercises connected to a 
mathemtical system to input the result in the system's language. On our 
demo, you will find exercise applets connected to MuPad. Authoring them 
is pretty easy as soon as you know MuPad code (which is similar to Maple 
btw). We had a connection to Maple but license prevents us to present it 
publically.

More work is being done to provide a more elegant output (using MathML 
and rendering engines)... and to connect to other systems, especially 
open-source ones.

There's an obvious interest into connection to a mathemtical system: 
evaluation of results is much better.

If you have more interest, we could send you a copy, it shall be 
open-source for academia.

Paul

PS: you might also want to look at WIMS (http://wims.unice.fr/) which 
has a long tradition in connection to math-systems.

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