I am very curious as to the current state of STACK. There would appear to be some very significant and exciting things happening in the development of math tools here on Moodle.
My questions:
Is stack ready for prime time? How much load can a STACK server manage?
It looks like STACK questions are delivered through the opaque question type. Can these be served remotely?
Is jsmath a requirement for the output, or is there fall back rendering?
I have spent some significant time preparing question sets for calculus and precalculus in GIFT format (around 7500 questions, but really only 750 or so types) but STACK authoring would be a significant improvement.
John
I have had the Stack question install on a $10/month server for about a month. There are some bugs, but it looks good to me. I am starting to write questions. Would you like to Skype? Also I have 3 servers developed. Some thing like Wolfram's.
I will setup the Stack question on a server of your choice for a price. Check my profile for an e-mail.
Larry(alias)
John,
I think the best person to tell about current state of STACK is Christopher Sangwin, see for example
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=137440
http://stack.bham.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
http://stack.bham.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Installation
http://stack.bham.ac.uk/new-moodle/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/stack/
As far as I have understood the current state is beta and there may be some difficulties in installing the required parts to different environments - and it certainly takes time but Stack forums have lots of nice people using STACK - open source and free to use and install for everybody like moodle.
I think the best person to tell about current state of STACK is Christopher Sangwin, see for example
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=137440
http://stack.bham.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
http://stack.bham.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Installation
http://stack.bham.ac.uk/new-moodle/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/stack/
As far as I have understood the current state is beta and there may be some difficulties in installing the required parts to different environments - and it certainly takes time but Stack forums have lots of nice people using STACK - open source and free to use and install for everybody like moodle.
<2 BTW, Chris does monitor and contribute in this forum.
Hi John
Thanks for your interest in STACK.
Simon and I are working hard to make the code reliable and efficient. We've been using it this term with groups of 225 students in large computer labs here in Birmingham. I'm confident now it is working well, but am also painfully aware of some minor bugs we need to fix!
Yes, questions can be served remotely. We have a "minimal client", you might like to look at this here.
http://matsrv3.bham.ac.uk/worksheets/
This uses the opaque protocol, (as does Moodle) but does not have any content management. This is really just to demonstrate STACK is not tied to Moodle. Also, the source code of these questions is already in the STACK CVS, so they are available for use by anyone.
I've used JSMath because (i) it is a Moodle filter, and (ii) seems to work well. STACK now just leaves the LaTeX in the question. STACK could generate some MathML on the fly but the question author also needs to write some mathematics. And, we wanted to put answer boxes into equations! JSMath seems to be working well. Students very much appreciate the ability to scale the mathematics, but keep the main font size fixed. So JSMath is not a "requirement" in theory, but is the only supported mechanism currently.
I'd be happy to receive contributions from other LaTeX->screen solutions, tuned for STACK. The reason you need JSMath on the STACK server itself is for the teacher to test questions with the direct interface. If you only author yourself through Moodle, then JSMath need only be on Moodle.
If you have questions you are willing to share in STACK format, there are plenty of holes in our current coverage. We are working on 140 algebra questions to cover the material in http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/staff/ad_barnard/Pocket.pdf I had hoped these would be ready before term, but I just keep being ambushed with something else!
We have some partial converters for other question formats into STACK.
http://stack.bham.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Converting_question_formats
So, if you have lots of existing materials it may be possible to get STACK to load and partially convert them.
Thank you for your interest,
Chris