Building (Ev)anAcademy Exercises for Reassessments

I’ve written multiple times previously about WeinbergCloud, the system I created using the Meteor framework that lets students sign up for reassessments. Over the course of the semester, I’ve been developing some aspects of the system that I’m excited about, and I’ll talk about them all eventually. One in particular has held my focus for the past few days, and it’s probably the one feature I’ve been talking about for the longest: building a reassessment engine within the system.

Part of this is out of necessity. The wireless network settings on our school network have changed, so the Python reassessment engine that I’ve used for reassessments over the last two years no longer works when hosted on my personal laptop. I’ve managed reasonably well this year using problems from textbooks and handouts, but it became time to automate this using my new knowledge of Javascript and Meteor.

Whatever your feelings about Khan Academy, the reality is that the organization has put a lot of energy and resources into developing a pretty comprehensive web application built around assessment. Not only are these resources available for free for teachers and students to use, but the source code is as well. The code for anyone to be able to run their own local version of exercises has been around for a while at Github here. The Javascript libraries that go with these exercises are also pretty impressive and capable – generating random numbers with constraints, simplifying fractions and expressions, and numerous other helper functions are already written by people that code much better than I do. They also wrote a math-typesetting library called KaTEX that has some performance advantages over some other libraries…or so I hear. I’m sure much of the ‘why’ here is lost on me.

After two days of tinkering, I’ve adapted some of their code in my app for the purposes of generating questions for reassessments. Writing questions and defining variables is all done in HTML, just as in their own local application, which means it’s possible to add questions without having to load in a database through FTP or some other method. The code rendering the questions onto the webpage I had to write myself, but eventually I determined some ways to make this work for me.

I can put in HTML and Javascript definitions into text areas. Here’s an example of a question asking for a simplified fraction for slope:

A preview appears below to make sure the question appears the way I want it. In the variable definitions are strings of Javascript code that calculate and define the variables using the Khan Academy utility functions. The question text is then rendered using KaTEX. The random values change on each reload of the page, but these values could potentially be fixed for an individual student’s quiz.

As I create frames for questions, I get a virtually infinite supply of questions I can use for assessing students on learning. Here are a bunch that I put together for testing the interface:

The next step is to link each question frame to a course standard and build my database of questions. I’m loving the possibilities for building on this further, and will share as they develop. Stay tuned.