Mathematics tools

A river of tools,
And rafts of materials,
Our course awaits us.

Well, I think what little I have been able to wrestle together is hopefully a bit better than my 30 second haiku, but not by much.....

There are huge amounts of really great expository material out there (for example mathpages.com and purplemath.com) but almost nothing I could find that provided anything like a lesson that could be included in Moodle. Perhaps the best exception was a collection of hotpots which required payment; good work and the price was reasonable.

Another bright spot is descartes, which I have posted about before. I have been fiddling with modifying some of descartes to make it less, well European I guess.... ;=} I was working with a teacher who wanted to do something similar with Java Sketchpad but that project never got off the ground.

Found quite a bit of hotpot on-line, but no Native files and almost all so out of date that they were unusable (thanks to Gordon for helping figure that bit out). I inquired of one person who had created a set of hotpots for their state's exit exams if they were interested in providing Native HotPot files for updating, and that didn't seem to go anywhere either ;=}

I think it might be helpful if a consortium of Math Moodlers either approached the authors of the existing resources to license Moodle extensions or developed same on their own.

While I think STACK is great, I think it is too much for most Moodlers, as would be a full blown webworks, but I think using the reduced webworks questbank module (not sure if its out for 1.9 yet) together with a shared subset of the testbank it would not be that hard to come up with a set of "standardized" classes..... Perhaps create a cooperative where your access to the courses is based on your contribution ot the project ;=}

I the interim, I have been fiddling with some Algebra cours that is set up largely to just provide examples of what is available out there, and I will make it available at some point....