[Aimmath-developers] answerboxsize> flag

[Ken M. <mo...@pt...>]

I just committed a batch of changes to implement an answerboxsize> flag.
The abbreviation is as>.
This only affects Text questions, not MATRIX, MC, or MR.

as> w

sets the width of the <input> box for the student's answer to the
nonnegative integer w, and

as> w,h

uses a <textarea> element with w columns and h rows for the student's answer
instead.  Specifying

as> 0

prevents any answer box from being displayed to the student.

There are three purposes for doing this.

First, I sometimes want to use AiM to ask the students a randomized question
that they are to write up on paper and hand in.  In that situation we would
want to disable the input box to avoid confusion.  For example,

v> 0
l> a,b,x
h> a,b:=Rand(Seq([2..9],2));
t> Prove that $f(x)=@a*x+b@$ is a continuous function. \\
   \\
   Write up your proof on paper and hand it in in class.
c> string
ap>
as> 0
a> ""
end>

Second, using a <textarea> box allows us to have a crude survey/essay
mechanism. For example,

v>  0
t>  Essay: What is your opinion of AiM?
c>  string
ap>
as> 40,5
a>  ""
end>

To view the "results" of the survey, we can Analyze the question and ask it
to show the final answers (or rawanswers).  I modified the appropriate
routines so that AiM preserves the formatting of the students' answers when
the answer is a string (so the essay doesn't get formatted as a single long
string).

Finally, this gives us a crude method of placing the answer input box in the
middle of an AiM question.  Since we can include LaTeX and @-substitutions
in both the ap> and the pp> text, the trick is to use the ap> and pp>
prompts to actually write the surrounding text like this:

ap> Jack and{ }
as> 6
pp> went up the hill.
c>  string
a>  "Jill"
end>

To accommodate this "trick" I also modified the behavior of AiM when the
student shows solutions, so that it still shows the
answerprompt-answerbox-postprompt line, but with the answerbox disabled
(i.e. they can't type in it) and it's background color changed to grey.
This allows the students to see their last raw answer in addition to their
last LaTeX'ed answer as parsed and simplified by Maple, which is useful in
cases where the mark the quiz by clicking Show Solutions.

KEN

-----------------------------------------
Ken Monks - Professor of Mathematics
            University of Scranton
            Scranton, PA 18510
email: mailto:mo...@sc...
web:   http://www.scranton.edu/~monks
-----------------------------------------