DragMath and TeX filter

DragMath and TeX filter

by John Bales -
Number of replies: 14

I would like to use Moodle for making math quizzes. However, the Drag Math tool appears to be unusable. I have yet been able to write a quadratic expression using Drag Math, even after multiple attempts. Once one enters anything into an exponent field, you cannot ever get the cursor out of the exponent field.

Also, when entering LaTeX expressions into the editor when either writing or taking a quiz using double dollar signs, there is no way to preview the expression before submitting. The editor does not have a preview button. This is a serious omission, especially since the TeX filter sometimes does not work properly and it is necessary to resubmit.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to John Bales

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by Marc Grober -
It appears that you are not interested in any assistance; I certainly did not find any question marks in your post. So I will limit my response to suggesting that your declarations may be inaccurate.
Average of ratings: -
In reply to John Bales

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by John Bales -

I see that this was more a gripe than an appeal for help.

I've been appointed to a committee trying to find a replacement for Blackboard, which is somewhat limited when it comes to mathematics. I was excited to learn that Moodle has a TeX filter and was somewhat frustrated and disappointed that it was not as easy to use as I had hoped. To be useful it has to be accessible to students.

The TeX filter sometimes mangles perfectly formed markup. This would not be a problem if it were possible to preview the typeset expression before submitting an  answer to a quiz question, for example. I can keep deleting and re-writing quiz problems until the LaTeX is correctly interpreted, but the students cannot see their displayed expressions until after they have submitted their answer and have no opportunity to correct it without re-working the quiz.

Is there any way to preview a math expression in a quiz answer before submitting the answer for credit?

Average of ratings: -
In reply to John Bales

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by Carles Aguiló-Collado -

Hi John,

I dare proposing that a commercial plugin might fulfill your expectations what regards mathematics into Moodle: WIRIS editor is a visual (WYSIWYG) equation editor and WIRIS quizzes adds random variables, automatic evaluation and an equation editon editor for the student to type in his answer.

You can find all the info at http://docs.moodle.org/en/WIRIS.

Hope this helps you make a decision about moving to a new platform. wink

All the best,

Carles Aguiló

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Carles Aguiló-Collado

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by Colin Fraser -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Testers

DragMath is one tool, but MathJax another and there are several other tools, I am sure. WIRIS is a reasonable tool, it will do the job, but like a lot of similar tools, it too has some issues. Do not equate commercial with "good" and open source with "bad" that is a huge mistake. Also realise that the essential idea of Tex was a tool for typesetting printed documents and what we are doing with the Tex tools is essentially misusing a tool. (I know, it has been "improved" for the electronic environment, but that is like saying Windows 95, 98, ME, XP and Vista were "improvements" over DOS - that they may have been, but they still carried the essential flaws of DOS). As someone said "It is not that the bear dances it is that the bear dances". depends where you put the "emfaa-rsis".

One company I worked with dumped Web-CT for Blackboard, and a year later went back to Web-CT and within a year was using Moodle, (I had left before that decision was made, but would have supported it none-the-less.) I am in an environment that is currently using Blackboard for the major part of its internet framework, and Moodle for only a very small part, but not for much longer.

I say this because of the huge changes in Moodle, DragMath and so on. It may be better for you to recognize right now that there is no single tool that will fully satisfy all your requirements. Dragmath will work, but maybe not without some tweaking. Marc and Mauno are both excellent at these tools and they will give you all the help you need, but you have to play nicely.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Colin Fraser

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by Carles Aguiló-Collado -

Hi colin,

I totally agree with your warning "Do not equate commercial with good and open source with bad". There is no thumb rule about this, otherwise we would all be using either one or the other... smile

I'd be glad to know which issues you've found on WIRIS editor, so that it can keep on improving.

All the best,

Carles

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Carles Aguiló-Collado

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by John Bales -

Carles,

Thanks for link. I will check that out.

John

Average of ratings: -
In reply to John Bales

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by Colin Fraser -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Testers

Hi Carles,

Assuming I have the right tool btw...  For me, (in the last version I used) the UI leaves a bit to be desired. The complexity and interdependencies of the toolbars (ribbons?), for example, has steepened the learning curve a lot, simply by tring to find what is available and where things are. I understand why it has been done that way, but I think it needs to be made more simple. After all, it is going to be teachers and scientists who will, I suspect, be the main audience, and maybe students who will have to be able to use it. None of these groups have the time, nor, in many cases, the inclination, to develop an understanding of a complicated tool. (e.g. Look at the  difference between Office 2003 and Office 2007 and why Office 2003 is still the preferred candidate for many people and organizations, simply based on the complexities of the Ribbon structures. It is changing but I am surprised at the number of places I go and they are still using 2003.)

Having said that.. mmm now that there has been a growing acceptance of that kind of change, it may very well be more acceptable. Dunno.. maybe. The real test, Is suspect, is going to be when sufficient number of schools for example, have their Moodles and are taking the development of their Maths resources seriously.  Wont be business, nor Universities, it will be if Maths teachers can take Wiris and use it without a great deal of thought, something Maths teachers, I observe, tend to find very difficult. If they can use it and promote it, then it will be accepted, but if they find it "too hard" they will keep looking until they find something that they find "simple" to use. Will not matter what anyone else thinks if they like it, they will use it. Its a bit like "Build it, and they will come." but they have to be able to grasp it and be productive in the first few minutes or it will be "too complex"  or "too difficult".

As to how you can simplify that, I have no idea, I don't design UIs, but I can say that the more complex the UI is, the less successful it will be. I hear terms like "intuitive" but the only time I see "intuitive" is my brother seeking out chocolate, or people finding answers to questions without any information to go on. Keep working on it... and, hopefully, you will prove me wrong.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Colin Fraser

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by Carles Aguiló-Collado -

Hi Colin,

The tool is also at the demo site wiris.com/demo-moodle , now you can be sure we're talking about the same one... smile

I forwarded your comments to the team leader, it's always excellent to get direct feedback from users. Thanks for that.

All the best,

Carles

Average of ratings: -
In reply to John Bales

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by Marc Grober -

OK,  let's start over.   The Tex filter included with Moodle is very simple and has its issues,  but you have to understand that the filter is separate and apart from Tex.... there is info here and there about this,  and Colin has been writing about it so if you have not looked through Moodle Docs you should, but I will give a brief tour here as a precursor perhaps to beefing things up.

The Moodle Tex filter is a simple mnded device that simply passes tokenized expressions to a Tex distribituion of your choosing.  Its that simple.  There is a fallback utility employing mimetex.I recommend TexLive...  you can do whatever you please. There are some limitations, yes. There are also workarounds.

DragMath has little to do in a real sense with the Moodle Tex filter.  It is a GUI constructor.  Period. That simple.  It creates text expressions,  and can put those expressions in tokens.   In fact, it can create Tex expressions and put them in the tokens that the Moodle Tex filter uses.

MathJax is a display techmnology like Tex. It is not as encompassing,  but it has some very nice features.

ASCIIMathML is both a syntax and a display technology and because of itis structure, quite a few people have played with using it as a way to edit equations.

I wanted to se an integrated math tool allowing students to graph and write equatins transparently and have been beating the drum about that for some time.  Mauno began experimenting with inyMCE and eventually asembled for Moodle 2 something I called SEE - it has some extraordinary features and can integrate quite a few tecnologies including jsxgraph and GeoNext, asciimathml and mathjax, and graphing calculator. At some point (perhaps when Moodle 2 is production worthy)  he will offer the entire package in contrib - in the meantime I believe you can track the link to his demo code through this forum.  I think you will see - lol - that SEE does almost everything you could hope to have available in an LMS.

That being said there is still much you can accomplish in Moodle 1.9,  but if you want assistance it is critical that you detail your questions. To say that Moodle is mangling your Tex provides us with no usable information. It may be that it is mimetex that is causing the trouble, NOT Tex.  And Tex is totally transparent,  so your comment that its not easy to use is on the face of it hardly informative. Moreover, in any item in which the student is given an editor,  dragmath is available and can produce this: $$y=a\left(x-h\right)^{2}+k$$

Yes, the filter is problematic because that is not parsed (the student now only sees the Tex text Tex expression, but then the student already reviewed it before he submitted it....  BUT this limitation can be resolved in  part in Moodle 1.9 by using ASCIIMathML.  There are a number of lengthy threads about using ASCIIMathML this way, but if you re just starting with Moodle, as yor note suggests,  then you may want to jump to M2 and Mauno's package, which arguably moots the earlier work.

SO yes, there is a way to preview a math expression by using  a format for your quiz that provides the html editor, by using asciimath, or by allowing the student to submit the answer so that the response is parsed, and then re-edit.  Yes that are some issues .....
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Marc Grober

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by John Bales -

Marc,

Thank you for the information and your response. I am sincerely sorry for the tone of my original post and hope you and others who were offended will accept my apology.

I've been playing with DragMath some more and now have a better idea of how it works, so I think I can explain it to my students. For me it is faster and easier to type the raw LaTeX and I have found that LaTeX is fairly easy for students to pick up as well though they might prefer something like DragMath. I have used online exercises of the multiple choice variety for several years now but I like to see student's written work also. That is not so easy to do online but I think tools are evolving to the point where that is beginning to be do-able. I do appreciate those of you whose work is making this possible.

John Bales, Prof.

Tuskegee University

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Marc Grober

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by Carles Aguiló-Collado -

Thanks Marc for disentangling the conceptual mess wink

And going a bit technical, I want to add that WIRIS editor builds an image during edition of the text to keep it WYSIWYG, but it stores MathML when saving the content, so it also uses the Moodle TeX filter for the final render, which works flawless for us.

All the best!

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Carles Aguiló-Collado

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by Carles Aguiló-Collado -

Oooops! Sorry, we use the MathML filter and not the TeX one... But it works fine for us! wink

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Carles Aguiló-Collado

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by Colin Fraser -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Testers

Hi Carles,

Yes, it is the same tool, and please, I may have seemed a little harsh but I wasn't trying to be. Wiris is a decent tool it does what is needed of it, except that it still does not have the "therefore" symbol in it. I know that there is a lot more development to occur and I suppose my real issue that the average User is lazy and expects too much or perhaps is just frightened by something new and different - perhaps the fear of being made to look stupid by a thing. Keep on it, DragMath is going the same path but I do not think it is as well developed as Wiris. Certainly that visual UI (ribbons or graphic toolbars) is the preferred method of presenting tools, makes it easier in the long term.

Another issue is one that Marc mentioned, the development of a "universal" tool. Mauno has done the first part with SEE, and what a great effort that is - now he has done it, it is really up to everyone else to catch up. Perhaps we really will see a single tool that can do everything we need it to do.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Colin Fraser

Re: DragMath and TeX filter

by Carles Aguiló-Collado -

Hi,

No prob, you didn't sound harsh to me.

WIRIS does have the "therefore" symbol, though, and believe me, we keep the thing as simple as we could think of. We expect the user to click on icons on a palette, I don't think we set our expectations too high... wink

Average of ratings: -