Whatever happened to Dragmath Response?

Whatever happened to Dragmath Response?

by Avrila Klaus -
Number of replies: 9

I recently upgraded to 2.7 from 2.0 (with the standard stopover at 2.2 IIRC), and quizzes broke. I can't preview quizzes with DMR questions, nor add any new question to any quiz and long story short I'm pretty sure from error messages that both these problems are DMR related.


My ideal solution would be a compatible version of DMR that I could throw in and go (looked for this but couldn't find anything more recent than what I have), but I'm open to other suggestions, just need to get quizzes back in working order. Thanks in advance!

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In reply to Avrila Klaus

Re: Whatever happened to Dragmath Response?

by Jean-Michel Védrine -

I must admit that I completely forgot about that question type (I don't use it myself) so it was never upgraded.

Now that Dragmath applet will no more be part of core in Moodle 2.8 (it will be possible to install it as a TinyMCE plugin from the Plugins directory but obviously that would not help for DMR question type so we would have to include a copy of Dragmath into it !) and that it become very difficult to use unsigned Java Applets in most browsers, I am unsure of the future of DMR and if I should spend some time to upgrade it to Moodle 2.7.

Maybe a better question would be to think of a general way for questions to use a GUI for math answers input ?


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In reply to Jean-Michel Védrine

Re: Whatever happened to Dragmath Response?

by Avrila Klaus -

Well, the LaTeX equation editor that comes standard in the HTML editor is missing buttons for fractions and exponents. That's a pretty serious limitation for what I have going (a basic algebra class) but probably not too hard to fix, so, it seems that it would be possible to use that the way Dragmath was used before. I am not at all sure how to implement this though as my coding skills are only a little above copy and paste.

Since it looks like this is going to involve a new question type, is there a way other than manually re-entering to change a question from one type to another?

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Re: Whatever happened to Dragmath Response?

by Joshua Bragg -

There was a bug raised about the dearth of the useful options like fractions and what not before 2.7 was released (MDL-45067) along with the matrix being messed up on the last page but it still hasn't been fixed.

With that said its pretty straightforward to add in what you want and get rid of the more useless elements like \( \diamond \) or \( \ominus \).  I just redid our entire structure earlier this week for our math teachers.

Just go to (or get your admin to):

Site Administration > Plugins > Text Editors > Atto HTML Editor > Equation Editor settings

There is a pretty solid list of options to include in MDL-45067.
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Re: Whatever happened to Dragmath Response?

by Avrila Klaus -

Thanks for the info. I will look into doing this ASAP so that, where the default editor can be used, it will be more useful. It's a shame it can't be used for a new tool to do DMR's job since, all other things being equal, it's always nice to be consistent.

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Re: Whatever happened to Dragmath Response?

by Jean-Michel Védrine -

If I wrote something about the new equation editor in ATTO it was because DMR is dependant on DragMath that will not be part of core Moodle starting from Moodle 2.8.

But unfortunately the new equation editor is just an ATTO plugin and I don't think it can be used outside from ATTO.

So that would not work for DMR which is just a shortanswer question with an applet for the teacher or student to enter his response.

The only solution I see is to do a new version of DMR for Moodle 2.7 and to include DragMath in it, so that it doesn't stop from working when Moodle 2.8 will be released.

I will do it but I can't give any date for the release. Probably before the end of July.

The easy part is to upgrade all the php code. This is easy because mostly you just copy and paste code from 2.7 version of the shortanswer question type just changing "shortanswer" to "dmr" (well there are some more things to look at, but you get the idea)

The tricky part is to add the Java applet and upgrade the Javascript. This is more difficult because of my poor Javascript knowledge and because the Javascript code for DMR was done by Morten Brydensholt, so I must first understand how it works !


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Re: Whatever happened to Dragmath Response?

by Jean-Michel Védrine -

Hello Avrila,

I have done a first alpha (so not even beta or stable !) version of the dmr qtype for Moodle 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7.

Please note that apart from trying to create a few DMR questions and previewing these questions it is completely untested. Unfortunately I will not find the time to do complete tests before at least a week.

Also I am unable to test the upgrade procedure as I have no install with the old version of DMR for Moodle 1.9 or 2.0 (In fact I have no install of Moodle 1.9 or 2.0 !!)

I hope you don't have student attempts from Moodle 2.0 that you expect to retrieve in Moodle 2.7 because I think this is completely impossible to do now, because the code to upgrade question attempts from Moodle 1.9/2.0 to the new question engine introduced with Moodle 2.1 was removed from Moodle 2.7.

I would strongly advise to test this version of DMR on a test install and not on your production website.

Unfortunately, because this new version include the DragMath applet, the zip file is too big to be attached to this message. I can send it to you if you accept the risk of testing this early release.


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Re: Whatever happened to Dragmath Response?

by Avrila Klaus -

Fortunately, I don't need to salvage any student work. 

I'd be happy to try out an early test version (although there may be some delay as I get a test install set up since I've been working with just the production install) -- after all, I'm the one that needs the finished product but has too weak code-fu to make it myself, so, anything I can do to help...

My best email address for sending files is on my course profile for "Moodle in English."

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Re: Whatever happened to Dragmath Response?

by Jean-Michel Védrine -

Hello,

Just to report that a version of the Dragmath response question type is now available at:

https://github.com/jmvedrine/moodle-qtype_dmr

Click on "Download ZIP"  on the right, you will get a moodle-qtype_dmr-master.zip  archive, unzip, rename the folder from "moodle-qtype_dmr-master" to just "dmr" and upload to the question/type subdirectory of your Moodle website (if you have an older version installed, don't forget to remove all the old files before installing the new version)

This version has been tested with Moodle 2.7 (and 2.8dev) but should be working with Moodle 2.5 and 2.6 too.

I have tested restoration of Moodle 1.9 and 2.0 course backups containing quizzes with dmr questions  (for 2.0 backups, students attempts are restored, but not for 1.9 backups). No problem detected.

Upgrading from prior versions seems to be working too, but upgrade of students attempts is not currently possible, because when upgrading from Moodle 1.9 or 2.0 you need an intermediate step at Moodle 2.2. I have an experimental version of Dragmath Response question type for Moodle 2.2 available. In fact this version is not complete: it can just be used for upgrading but can't be used in quizzes by students, so I will not make it publicly available. If somebody need it to upgrade a Moodle website from Moodle 1.9 or 2.0 retaining students attempts to DragMath Response questions (this appears to me as a very unlikely event !) I will send it this version privately.

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In reply to Jean-Michel Védrine

Re: Whatever happened to Dragmath Response?

by Jean-Michel Védrine -

Sorry to report I found a typo in the backup code (I forgot to change 2 occurences of "shortanswer" to "dmr", silly me !). What is annoying is that it prevent all courses backups when there is a dmr question in that course.

I pushed version 1.31 to https://github.com/jmvedrine/moodle-qtype_dmr to correct this problem.

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