MathAuthor: Authoring Interactive Math Exercises for the Web
The creation of online exercise sheets or interactive lecture notes for math courses still poses many challenges for teachers. Authoring tools of e learning systems typically do not directly support the rendering of mathematic equations. Teachers are therefore required to find and install additional plugins. Visual elements such as plots, drawings or diagrams have to be created using external tools. Exercise questions and student responses are mostly restricted to simple multiple choice or fixed answer questions, since common e learning systems are not able to process mathematic expressions. With MathAuthor we propose an authoring environment tailored to the specific needs of math educators. MathAuthor allows teachers to quickly create interactive exercises with various types of mathematic responses (e.g. functions, solution sets etc. Its web based editing functionality allows a real time preview of all created content elements including equations and interactive input fields. MathAuthor also proposes a language for describing mathematic plots and 3D drawings, allowing teachers to easily embed graphics (e.g. function curves or vector geometry drawings) MathAuthor can provide immediate feedback to student responses. This feedback is generated purely in Javascript, thus requiring no special server component. As a consequence, it is easy to integrate the resulting exercise sheets into existing websites and e learning systems.
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