I am planning to develop a module for mathematics assessment using AIM (http://sourceforge.net/projects/aimmath/).
AIM solves two problems that arise when trying to automatically mark mathematics homework:
- Checking the correctness of the answer to a mathematics problem is hard because there is often not a unique way of expressing the answer. AIM solves this problem by feeding the student's answer to MAPLE, a computer algebra package.
- Students may be tempted to copy the answer off each other. AIM solves this problem by allowing the problem to contain random parameters, so that every student has a different problem to solve.
Thus AIM has the same purpose as WeBWorK that Zbigniew Fiedorowicz has already integrated with Moodle (http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=798). However unlike WeBWork, AIM does not require programming abilities to design the questions.
We have a grant to roll out AIM across all large modules in the Department of Mathematics at the University of York. As part of this project I am planning to employ Moodle in our Department at the same time to provide a comfortable front end.