[WWdevel] Sequential problems and hardcopy

[Davide P. C. <dp...@un...>]

Folks:

There has been some questions on the discussion board recently about  
multi-part or sequential problems, and I have been thinking about  
some issues that came up when I worked on a solution for one of these.

First, the text that is displayed for sequential problems is  
dependent on the answers that the student has given so far, but since  
the hardcopy processing does not have access to those answers, the  
hardcopy will never show the later parts of the problem, on the first  
part.  How hard would it be to pass the answers to the hardcopy  
processor so that an accurate version of the problem can be  
generated?  (I know that there will be lookup time, and since the  
hardcopy can show many problems, how significant would that be?)

One interesting possibility that this would create is that the  
hardcopy could (optionally) include the answers the student has  
typed, so that she could get a permanent record of her solutions, and  
they could even be printed within the problem, on the answer blanks  
(though that might cause formatting problems, I suppose).

Second, when a sequential problem goes on to the second part, it  
would be nice to be able to have the option of preventing the student  
from altering the answers to the first part.  This could cause the  
second part to disappear again, for example, or if the second part  
depends on the values of the first part, you might not want the  
student to go back and change the previous answers to make the later  
part easier.

This could be done by disabling the answer blanks for the first part,  
so they would still show up (with the student answer showing), but  
not be editable.  You could have something similar to Mike's  
STOP_PROCESSING()/RESUME_PROCESS() commands, say  
BEGIN_DISABLED_ANSWERS()/END_DISABLED_ANSWERS() or something like  
that.  (In addition to disabling them, you would need to include a  
hidden field so that the data is still passed to the form on the next  
submission.)

Comments?

Davide