Teaching programming and Chemistry

Re: Teaching programming and Chemistry

by Tim Hunt -
Number of replies: 0
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

"Since Moodle quizes are more option based" - I don't know what you mean by this.

Anyway, the real question is, what are you trying to assess here? and how much to do you expect the computer do be able to grade for you?

Certainly Moodle can pose the problem and grade the final numerical result. The standard Moodle numerical question type can grade that the unit is correct. The OU-created add-on Var-numeric (https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=qtype_varnumeric or https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=qtype_varnumericset ) will grade whether the student has given the answer to the correct number of decimal places / significant figures, and will let you set different randomly generated versions of the problem, so different students have to do slighly different tasks. Sadly, no question type can grade both sig. figs. and units yet, but one is being worked on.

No computer software can grade the entirity of the students's argument, and determine whether all the steps are logical.

If you want, you could give students the method, and just have them fill in the gaps, but that is a much easier problem. Having the student work the problem on their own is much better. However, if you do want to feed them the steps, then STACK (https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=qtype_stack ) can do questions like that.

It is perfectly reasonable to have a problem where the student works it all out on paper, and then types in the final answer. The OU has some physics courses like that. Students probably have to compute quantum mechanics things for about 20 minutes on a bit of paper before submitting the final answer to Moodle.

Average of ratings: Useful (1)