[Aimmath-developers] changes

[Neil S. <N.P...@sh...>]

Dear All,

I have just committed a large batch of changes to the develop_2_1 branch.
This is really a bit premature, buy I am going on holiday for the next
two weeks and I wanted to leave Gustav et al with something to work with.
In particular, many things have not been adequately tested (please help
with this!) and the documentation is not up to date.

There are two large scale changes.

(1) I have implemented multipart questions, using a syntax similar (but
    not identical) to that in the Gent version of AIM.  There is a sample
    at the end of this message, and I have updated the question format
    documentation to explain how it works.  I have not yet implemented
    hints and optional subquestions, but I think that would be a relatively
    easy next step.

(2) I have changed the user interface for students, to allow them to focus
    on an individual question.  This should improve response times quite
    substantially.  However, I have not updated the student help page yet.

(3) The maple part of AIM now imposes time limits on many things such as
    initializing a question, constructing the solution, or marking an
    answer.  All time limits default to 2 seconds, but there is a
    new timelimit>/tl> flag allowing you to specify a different limit
    for a particular question.

Here are a couple of more technical things:

(4) As a first step towards integrating AIM with Moodle or other VLE's,
    I have made AIM mark up its output in a way that can more easily be
    parsed by other programs.  This is mostly achieved by using <div> and
    <span> tags.  For example, question 7.2 now comes wrapped in
    <div class='question' id='question7.2'> ... </div>, and the solution
    comes wrapped in <div class='solution'> ... </div>.  I also made some
    changes to move closer to strict compliance with the XHTML standard,
    eg replacing <br> by <br /> everywhere.  This will be useful if and
    when we move to using MathML.

(5) I have made some changes to the object oriented programming framework,
    to make it fit better with the Maple debugger.  In particular, the
    procedures used to perform methods, which were previously anonymous,
    now have names: for example, the 'Show' method for
`aim/Question/Instance`
    objects is called `aim/Question/Instance!Show`, and this name is
    reported in error messages, and can be passed to debugger functions such
    as stopat().

Some smaller changes:

(6) There is a facility to make a list of all messages that might need to
    be translated for internationalization.

(7) There is a postprompt>/pp> flag, for putting some text directly after
    the input box in a text question.

(8) The trylast.mpl file has disappeared; it is replaced by the trylast()
    function which is now defined explicitly in Console.mpl

There are probably some more things that I have forgotten for the moment.

Here is a sample multipart question:

name> subtraction
t> Here are some questions about subtraction
h> n := rnd(5..10);
sq>
t> What is @2*n@ - @n@?
av> x
a> n
esq>
sq>
t> Here are some subsubquestions
sq>
h> m := rnd(11..20);
t> What is @n@ - @m@?
s> [proc(ans)
     `aim/SetAnswerNote`(sprintf("x = %A\n<br>\ny = %A\n<br>\n",x,y));
     `aim/Test`(ans,n-m);
    end,
    n-m]
esq>
sq>
t> What is @n@ - 2?
a> n-2
esq>
esq>
end>



Neil