Re: [Aimmath-developers] bugs and delay

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

On Sat, 30 Aug 2003, Neil Strickland wrote:
> I will work on AIM this evening and tomorrow evening, which
> should be enough to clear the bugs that I currently know about,
> in particular the problem with the s> flag.
> 
> I agree with Gustav that we should definitely make a release in time
> for the coming semester in Britain.  I would ask everyone on
> the list to help by testing things as thoroughly as they can over
> the next week.

I have been using a version of AiM based on the state of about 4-5 weeks
ago for our quizzes here (our 2nd semester started then). There were a few
minor bugs (which may even be fixed by now), but the new multipart 
question feature was such a valuable new feature (thanks Neil) that I have 
been working around the bugs. I agree with the sentiments above ... the 
idea of a freeze on new code, is to prevent the entry of a potential horde
of new bugs which might delay the release of version 3.0 even further.

[BTW I hadn't realised that AiM stood for `Assessment in Mathematics'
 as opposed to AIM = Alice Interactive Mathematics where 
 ALICE = Active Learning In a Computing Environment. This is a bit of a
 shift in thinking, from a `learning tool' to an `assessment tool' ...
 personally I ascribe to the `learning tool' philosophy ... ]

I also have a lot of new code I'd like to add but I think it could be
improved significantly; the new code wouldn't look like a series of add-on 
hacks, if I were to implement an idea of a new flag. The idea is to have a 
flag ad> or answerdisplay> which would declare a function that would override
the standard display mechanism. Without such a feature I have resorted
to hacking TextQuestion.mpl at the point where it displays the student
and teacher answer.

We are just coming off a non-teaching week ... our next such break is in
another 4 weeks, by which time I'll be ready to test any new code Ken 
might have ready. Hopefully, the ad> idea will be ready too and my other
add-on features redesigned to use it. This will miss AiM 3.0 ... but I
think the most important thing this time around was the addition of
the multipart questions ... I didn't realise how much I'd missed this 
feature until I started using it.

  Regards,
  Greg