Computer Marked Maths now available

MSD Learning Technologies is now able to offer computer marked maths.

We are looking for departments with the University to make use of our project – for formative assessment at this stage. We particularly want to gauge enthusiasm and, ideally, to see examples of the questions which you’d find useful.

Highlights of the maths assessment system:

  1. interacts with Maxima which gives it full algebraic evaluation for simple or complex maths.
  2. allows use of random variables in questions
  3. can calculate and show worked answers
  4. can include control flow functions (if, while, etc, to modify or calculate variables)
  5. supports multiple tests on an answer (eg is it simplified? is it algebraically correct?)
  6. supports multi-part questions
  7. supports SI units
  8. supports questions requiring significant figures and decimal places

We have integrated with WebLearn, so you can offer assessments via your existing WebLearn sites. Assessments can also be provided as a standalone service using SSO if that is required.

The sponsorship of this project is through the IT Innovation Fund so we can offer this to any part of the University.

Moodle STACK installation on Ubuntu LTS

We’re investigating algebraic maths questions in Moodle at the moment. One of the question type plugins is STACK.

I tried to install the STACK question type plug in but it wasn’t working. The error was “CAS failed to return any data”.

The CAS is a Computer Algebraic System. In this case it is Maxima. Our server is Ubuntu. The latest Long Term Support version available is 14.04 Trusty. The default Maxima package for Trusty is Maxima 5.32. The minimum requirement is 5.25.1 but it wasn’t working for me. I decided to upgrade after a test on my local system.

I looked for a Launchpad repository which I could use for a prebuilt package to upgrade with. There are RPM files on the sourceforge homepage (for Red Hat) but no debs for Ubuntu.

The only option was to build the package from source.

Steps:

  1. install Ubuntu package dependencies: automake; clisp; gnuplot; texi2html and texinfo. The latter two are for the help files.
  2. remove currently installed version of maxima
  3. open the installation instructions for building from source
  4. clone using git command in their repository or download from source. Remember that the latest version supported by the Moodle plugin is 5.36.0
  5. go to the healthcheck <moodle_home>question/type/stack/healthcheck.php
  6. purge cache and check that all the tests complete successfully

Our implementation of the STACK question type now accepts the simple test question shown in the authoring guide.