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

System for Teaching and Assessment using a Computer algebra Kernel (STACK)


For my more advanced students, I have a set of Pythagorean Theorem questions where the lengths of sides are algebraic expressions, rather than just numbers. My students need to demonstrate their aptitude with quadratic expressions.

For example, they should be able to expand (x+4)(x-3).

The solution to this problem is usually written as x2+x-12. But what if the students entered x-12+x2 ? Would Moodle still mark this answer as correct?

At the very least, we need a question type that understands the commutative, associative, and distributive properties. The solution is provided by a Computer Algebra System (CAS). For a general background on computer algebra systems, refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_algebra_system.

STACK is a Computer Aided Assessment (CAA) system that overcomes these kinds of mathematical problems. STACK is the brainchild of Chris Sangwin; for more details on STACK, check out the STACK documentation...