I think I am failing to understand something about the new improved numerical unit handling in Moodle 2.0.
I was trying to create a question like
"What is the speed of light"
with right answer 3e8 m/s
and alternate units m and m/s/s that were graded wrong. Using the Multichoice (radio elements) display. However, the alternate units are being graded correct.
Am I just confused, or is there a way to do what I want?
Sorry, further thinking. I am wondering whether we really need the separate Instructions box in Moodle 2.0.
In Moodle 2.0, that was the only way to get the instructions to appear after the answer input.
However, in 2.1 dev, you can just enter question text like:
What do you get if you add 1 m to 25 cm?
_______ cm
Type your answer correct to three significant figures.
Therefore, we could get rid of the "Only the NUMERICAL ANSWER will be graded, Unit1 will be shown" and Instructions options. That would simplify the form a lot, without reducing the options for the teacher. (And the DB upgrade script is not impossible to write.) What do you think?
I would like another way of expressing intervals than value+/-tolerance, namely intervals, like I wrote in my wishlist:
Answer 1:[ 2.5 ] Accepted error ± [0.5] Grade: [100%] Feedback:
Answer 2: [ 100.4..100.5) ] Accepted error ± [_empty_] Grade: [90%]
Which would be interpreted 110.4 <= right < 100.5 i.e. the round parentheses would mean that that boundary not included in the interval. The .. notation for an interval is already used in the GIFT format.
Another useful possibility: that one could enter evaluation strings like 110.4<=ans<100.5||100.5<ans<=100.6 (I know that this particular thing can be addressed by having 100.5 +/-0 first than 100.5 +/-0.1)
In other words allow answers in the 110.4..110.5 or with ( and ) to indicate open interval ends, not including the limit: (110.4..110.5) or single ended oppeness: (110.4..110.5 110.4..110.5)
Otherwise it looks like almost all my wishes are a big step closer! Great work.
I think that we should make number processing depend on the language/locale of the student / course. That is, if you are in France, 1,000 should mean 1, and if you are in England, it should mean 1000. I have already coded that, and I think it works.
I think that other input formats, e.g. fractions, or proper scientific notation like 3×108, different number bases, different grading rules for decimal places or significant figures, etc. should be handled by creating separate question types from numerical/calculated. You need different configuration options on the question editing form to handle them.
They are also not necessarily backwards compatible with the current numerical qtype.
The OU are working on a question type with superscript and subscript input, and grading rules for marking scientifica notation. Once that is done, we will, of course, share it with the community, and invite comments.
No. That is older code. It is here
(for now. Hopefully this will be finished and merged into https://github.com/timhunt/Moodle-Question-Engine-2/tree/qe2_wip/ soon.)
You may well be right.
On the other hand, it worries me that for an English student, 1,000 could be iterpreted as 1.
I think I will leave my code as it is for now. That is not because I think I am right, but becuase I don't know what the right answer is, and want to get everything else finished first. We will have to come back to this point.
You need to be looking at this version: https://github.com/timhunt/Moodle-Question-Engine-2/tree/numerical, which is where I had got to about a week ago, before I got distracted by other things.
Sorry Pierre, I have been ignoring your question because I don't have a good answer right now. There must be useful ways you can help, but I am failing to think of good ways to split up the work. Also, I am currently swamped with 'help': http://tjhunt.blogspot.com/2011/04/performance-and-scalability.html.
I think right now it may actually more helpful if you don't try to help me with the new question engine. I may be being a bit too over-protective of 'my' pet project, but there are still some parts of the work that I would really like to do myself - if only I could get the time.
In the mean time, it is really helpful if you help people out in this forum, and work on fixing Moodle 2.0 quiz and questions issues (even though I have not yet found time to review your fix for MDL-24594). Actually, a version of that patch that works with the new question engine would be really good.
I will go on thinking about how best you can help on the new question engine, because your offer of help is appreciated.
To answer your question about the new numerical question type we are creating. You are right that we don't use the Moodle calculated question type at the moment. Most of our questions like that are done in our other OpenMark assessment system. So what we are doing is making a Moodle question type that does what our users are familiar with there.
On the one hand, that is just making a mess for the future, because it does not really make sense for Moodle to have two different calculated question types, and so at some point we might have to try to merge the two.
On the other hand, I look on this as an interesting opportunity to try some different things in relation to calculated questions, and in the future we may be able to create a single calculated qtype that combines the best of both.
Sorry, but 'two different calculated question types', I really meant 'OU numeric' and the set of standard 'caclulated, calculated simple and calculated multi' as the two things.
Also, after nearly 5 years as Moodle quiz maintainer, I have finally looked in detail at every corner of the code, except that I have never gone into great detail in either multianswer or calculated (and its siblings). That is becuase you have been looking after those areas, which is great for me, but I am not acutally looking forwards to really getting into those areas myself, which will almost complete my knowledge of the code. (Then I will happily hand them back to you )
We are not using calculated. For the one maths course that used a lot of numerical questions, some people in the maths faculty created a Python script that ran Maple to randomly generate a lot of question variants according to certain templates, and then converted the output to Moodle XML format. Then they imported those files into Moodle, and built quizzes using the random question type.
I am talking about the OU numeric when I am talking about inputting proper scientific notation including superscripts. If that works nicely, then we may want to steal it for use in other question types.
"Should we maintain calculated simple, calculated and multichoice calculated ?" and the following discussion.
You are asking good questions about what should happen, but I can't answer now. Ask me again after I have converted the existing code to Moodle 2.1, and I understand how everything currently works.
Sorry for the slow reply. I started writing earlier, but then went into my code and got distracted trying to make it reliably split the unit from the number when using a single input box. I think I have finally got it working.
I am replying here to make some general points, before responding separately to some of your more specific points.
The main point is that at this stage, my priority is to get something working in 2.1 that is backwards compatible with 2.0. I am not currently interested in adding new features, although clearly that is desirable, and there are a lot of good ideas in your post.
I am kind of hoping that you might be able to work on new features, so I don't have to worry about it.
The other general point is that I would rather leave it up to the teacher to type the particular instructions that they want to give their students. This is the most flexible options, and aslo the teacher konws best what their studnets might need to be told.
For example, in a quiz with a lot of numerical work, there probably needs to be detailed instructions in the first quiz, but as the course goes on, the teacher can start to assume that their students know what to do. At that point the instructions becomes a distraction and are best omitted.