The Numbas Blog

We’re starting a regular series of online drop-in sessions, open to anybody. This is an opportunity to have a chat with the Numbas development team and other members of the community about anything to do with Numbas. You could learn more about Numbas, ask for help writing questions or deploying Numbas exams, talk about what you’ve been doing, make a feature request, hear what we’re planning to develop next, or just hang out with us for a while.

We’ll run one session a month, rotating through Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday to match different people’s working patterns. Sessions will last two hours and take place during Newcastle’s core hours of 10:00 – 15:00, UK time. You’re welcome to join at any time and leave whenever you like.

The first few sessions are:

• Tuesday, 26th November 2024, 14:00 – 16:00 GMT.
• Wednesday, 18th December 2024, 10:00 – 12:00 GMT.
• Thursday, 16th January 2025, 13:00 – 15:00 GMT.

Here’s an update on Numbas developments since March. We made a separate post announcing the release of v4.0 of the Numbas LTI provider.

We’ve just released v8 of Numbas. There are a couple of technically small but highly noticeable changes to the Numbas runtime: auto-submission of answers and a revamp of the exam feedback settings.

We’ve just released a new major version of the Numbas LTI provider.

This release adds support for LTI 1.3. This is a new version of the LTI protocol, supported by all major virtual learning environments and providing new features.

We’ve also taken the opportunity to completely redesign the user interface from scratch, with a focus on accessibility and ease of use.

I’ve made a short video describing the changes in this version:

Last month I gave a talk about Numbas at JISC Connect More 2024.

Here’s the recording of the talk, with the introduction and Q&A trimmed off either end:

The slides are also online, in case you’d like to look at them.

Next month we’re running a couple of training sessions and we’re also trying a new drop-in session for anyone who wants to talk about Numbas.

Here’s a development update, covering everything that’s changed since November.

Most of my work has been on adding LTI 1.3 support to the Numbas LTI provider. We hope to have that ready to use by the summer, in time for the next academic year.

The rest of the development work has been mainly bug fixes, with a couple of new features in the Numbas runtime.

Here’s a development update, covering everything that’s changed since July.

I spent a lot of time on the Summer working on our other project, Chirun. I wrote a new LTI 1.3-compliant tool, to make it easier to embed Chirun material in our virtual learning environment. That’s now in use at Newcastle, and I’m looking for other institutions to test it with virtual learning environments other than Canvas or Moodle. Our intention is to make our server available to everyone, since it won’t handle any personally identifying information.

So it’s been a while since I had time to do a Numbas development update. There have been quite a few bug fixes and an encouraging number of contributions from other people. The main news is that the Numbas runtime is now WCAG 2.1 AAA compliant.

Here’s a development update, covering everything since the release of Numbas v7 last December.

Progress on Numbas has continued fairly quietly, while I’ve had to split my attention between this, Chirun, and other stuff at Newcastle.

I gave a talk at EAMS 2023 with an update on developments over the last year:

A bug was introduced in v7.0 of the Numbas runtime which led to variables whose names contain an uppercase letter not being correctly saved to the attempt suspend data. Exam packages downloaded from numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk between the 4th and 12th of December 2022 are affected. The values of these variables were not saved, so any attempts at affected packages can not be recovered correctly.

This would affect any students who left an in-progress attempt and later resumed it: they would potentially see different variable values to those they saw on the first launch.

Please check any packages that you downloaded between these dates and used with a SCORM player or the Numbas LTI tool. The bug is now fixed, so you should download a new copy of the exam package to replace the broken one.

We apologise for the inconvenience. Tests have been added to the automatic test suite to ensure this kind of problem doesn’t happen again.

It’s been a while since our last development update. The reason for that is that we’ve been working on some big changes to every bit of the Numbas software. We’ve released v7 of the Numbas app and editor, and a new lockdown app to integrate with the LTI provider which ensures that students can only access assessments in a restricted environment. There’s also a Safe Exam Browser integration, for in-person invigilated exams.

Laura Midgley has joined the team, replacing George Stagg, who left for an exciting job with RStudio.