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

ASCIIMathML and ASCIIsvg


The ASCIIMathML plugin also contains ASCIIsvg, a powerful tool for creating graphs of functions. What's great about ASCIIsvg is that we can use simple commands to create quite complex graphs and diagrams.

Let's start by including a graph of a simple function in our course using ASCIIsvg, in this case a graph of y=x2. Note that for this exercise I'm going to use Firefox, which includes built-in support for SVG graphics. Don't worry! We'll look at how other browsers support SVG in a later section.

Including graphs using ASCIIsvg

I'm going to include my graph on a Moodle web page. I've chosen a topic, clicked on the Add a resource drop-down list, and selected Compose a web page:

  1. 1. We can specify the function we want to plot directly into the HTML editor. I'm going to plot this graph in the simplest way possible by using a single command: plot(x^2). Don't forget to enclose the ASCIIsvg commands in single quotes:

  2. 2. Scroll down and click on the Save and display button...