There were various enhancements to STACK over the summer, and we have just packaged them up as a Version 3.3 release, which you can get from the plugins directory.
Here is Chris's summary of the improvements
- Added in the Question blocks
- Changes to validation of casstrings. We now allow syntax such as 3e2 to represent floating point numbers. The strict syntax settings still flag 3e2 as "missing stars".
- Improvements to catching common syntax errors with trig functions, e.g. sin^-1(x) or cos[x]
- Refactored the numerical tests. This means they are now standard Maxima tests, not using PHP.
- Allow the use of the Maxima orderless and ordergreat in cassessions. This helps with display, without turning off simplification.
- Expanding CAStext features.
- Enable a function as an answer type, e.g. improve validation.
- Refactor answer test unit testing to distinguish "test fail" from "zero".
- Reject things like sin*(x) and sin^2(x) as invalid
- Provide a new option on how parentheses are displayed for matrices
- Provide an extra syntax checking option to enable stars to be inserted between single characters, e.g. xy -> x*y.
- Add the input parameter
allowwordsto enable the teacher to specify some permitted words of more than 2 symbols length. - Reinstate the STACK 2 feature called "Hints". This has been done
as a "Fact sheet" to avoid ambiguity with other Moodle features. See Fact sheet documentation.
- Better install (auto OS detection), healtcheck and testing.
- When using the Maxima Pool servlet, it is now possible to use any type of HTTP authenication (e.g. basic or digest), and there is a separate configuration option, so that you don't need to put the username and password in the URL
Thanks to everyone who has contributed:
- Chris Sangwin (85 commits)
- Tim Hunt (36 commits)
- Mikael Kurula (5 commits)
- Matt Petro (1 commit)
- Jean-Michel Vedrine (1 commit)
And everyone who sent us bug reports, suggestions or comments.
