Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Math

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Math

Overview of this book

Moodle is a popular e-learning platform that is making inroads into all areas of the curriculum. Using moodle helps you to develop exciting, interactive, and engaging online math courses. But teaching math requires use of graphs, equations, special notation, and other features that are not built into Moodle. Using Moodle to teach Mathematics presents its own challenges. The book will show you how to set-up a Moodle course to support the teaching of mathematics. It will also help you to carefully explore the Moodle plugins that allow the handling of equations and enable other frequently used mathematical activities. Taking a practical approach, this book will introduce you to the concepts of converting mathematics teaching over to Moodle. It provides you with everything you need to include mathematical notation, graphs, images, video, audio, and more in your Moodle courses. By following the practical examples in this book, you can create feature-rich quizzes that are automatically marked, use tools to monitor student progress, employ modules and plugins allowing students to explore mathematical concepts. You'll also learn the integration of presentations, interactive math elements, SCORM, and Flash objects into Moodle. It will take you through these elements in detail and help you learn how to create, edit, and integrate them into Moodle. Soon you will develop your own exciting, interactive, and engaging online math courses with ease.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Math
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
Preface

How the Algebra Filter works


In order for Moodle to support math notation, we need to enable special filters that spot mathematics included in the text that we type into the HTML editor (that's what filters do, they filter your text for anything interesting). The filter we are using (assuming our admins have turned it on) is called the Algebra Filter. You'll have probably noticed that this filter detects mathematics surrounded by @@ characters. The concept of laying out math notation via special text-based codes is called "typesetting".

Typesetting mathematics

The notation you are including within the @@ characters is a kind of typesetting system called ASCII Math. The Algebra Filter then converts this into yet another kind of system called TeX (pronounced 'tek'). The filter then generates an image in GIF format, and for the sake of accessibility (at least for those users who know TeX), the alternative text of this image is the TeX version of the mathematics notation you originally typed...