Tim,
I was more and more thinking or merging the jme questiontype and Dragmath question type.
After all, both are small modifications of shortanswer and the only diffrence is the small part of the code that deal with the applet (both the code needed to display it and the name of the string we retreive from it).
But searching the forum I found a post where you said :
Create a whole lot of new question types. This includes
several variants of drag-and-drop;
a question type that can grade answers of up to a sentence length;
a variant of shortanswer/numerical qtype where students can easily enter superscripts and subscripts;
a question type that allows you to embed applets like the Java Molecular Editor or GeoGebra, the have what the student did graded by Moodle;
possibly a manually graded question type where the students can recored an audio clip, instead of writing an essay.
And another one :
Those are the ones that are definite. We have a few more ideas that may be a bit trickier to implement:
Essay questions with attachments.
Manually graded questions, where students record some audio (using a Java applet) rather than typing into the HTML editor.
A Java Molecular Editor question type that uses the pmatch algorithm, and possibly some other rules, to grade the result. (An example of an 'other rule' would be feeback based on whether the students had too many or too few carbon atoms in their molecule.)
Of course this open me quite a new perspective.
Looking a the pmatch question type in your repro I think that maybe it would be better to start from this one than from shortanswer (or even better to offer the choice between several methods : shortanswer, pmatch, regexp, ... and even better to allow for some possibility of extending it with new methods)
Also as a math teacher the goal to make a geogebra question type is very appealing to me
Displaying the applet is not difficult, of course we need to allow some customization (like load a .ggb file, ...)
We should also look at what geogebra method we want to grade
of course getDefinitionString is an obvious candidate but others are also interesting : getXcoord, getYcoord, getValue or getValueString, getCommandString, getObjectType
Also here allowing some choice would be better. We also need that the question author can input the name of the geogebra object he want to test somewhere.
But trying to do some sort of "swiss knife" do it all applet question type is maybe not the good solution. The real challenge is not to make a wonderfull question from the programmer point of view but a question simple enought to be widerly used. Maybe improved and separate jme, DragMath, Geogebra questions types would be better (I have some doubt that the same people want to use jme and Geogebra questions , but maybe I am wrong)
Myabe this is a good occupation for my Summer. Maybe also somebody is already working on this or maybe it's already done ?
If it is not already written, I really don't know how to begin.
Maybe by writting a something in the docs and allowing other to comment ?
It's in fact the first time that I plan to do anything other than maintaining existing pieces of code in Moodle since I wrote the responses quiz report many many years ago ! An Moodle have gone a long way since then !
