In this series of posts, we’re highlighting questions we’ve found on the public Numbas editor which do something innovative or are of particularly high quality.
In this question, Ben Brawn of the University of Newcastle, Australia (our namesake down under!) tests your understanding of plane transformations by asking you to move points on a function’s curve corresponding to a given transformation.
I like how this question encourages students to explore their understanding of plane transformations graphically, by dragging points about. They can also work the other way, writing coordinates in the boxes and seeing how that affects the graph. There’s extra information under the “Show steps” button, making great use of the conditional visibility feature to show hints relevant to the particular transformation shown.
We asked Ben how he uses Numbas in his teaching:
I work at the University of Newcastle, Australia in the Centre for Teaching and Learning as a Mathematics Learning Adviser. The select few of us with this title, work with students individually (through a booking system and regular drop in sessions) and in groups (through regular workshops) to help them make sense of mathematical content. We advise students on how to study for courses that involve mathematics, help them see the big picture in their courses and create mathematical learning resources that we feel are useful for students. We also try to work with lecturers to improve courses if we identify issues.
I create practice examples on basic maths topics (eg primary/high school) and share them on a Blackboard site that all the students at our university have access to. This way regardless of what degree they are studying they have access to basic maths practice and help. If they can’t follow the explanations given in the Numbas practice exams then they contact us for further help, either through email, video chat, or in person.
I have also created course specific questions and exams at the request of lecturers that are placed on their own blackboard course sites and these have only ever been used for practice without marks attached. But who knows, maybe one day we will use Numbas for assessment with marks attached.
Ben has produced a huge amount of high-quality questions on basic maths topics, with over 150 released under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence, free for anyone to re-use. Thanks, Ben!
Try this question out now on the Numbas editor, or have a look at Ben’s other freely-available content.
The MathJax team has announced that their free cdn.mathjax.org service, which serves copies of MathJax, will shut down on April 30, 2017 – the end of this month. Numbas uses MathJax to render mathematical notation using LaTeX, and until now the default theme has used cdn.mathjax.org.
This is much less notice than we would’ve liked, but it’s out of our hands. So we need to change how Numbas uses MathJax from now on, and the shutdown has ramifications for existing exam packages.
How Numbas will use MathJax from now on
In short: there’s a new default URL, and you shouldn’t notice any difference. You can configure Numbas to use your own copy of MathJax if you’d prefer.
Read the rest
We’ve made a few changes to Numbas and the editor recently, with the aim of improving usability. It involved moving some parts of the editor around, so I thought I’d better show what we’ve done.
First of all, when you submit an answer to a part of a Numbas question, the input changes colour depending on the score you were awarded. (If you’ve got score feedback turned off, it turns the same colour no matter how you did)
Here’s an example:
Read the rest
Numbas has acquired a few new features and had a bit of a tidy-up in the last couple of months, so I thought it was time to bump the version number up to 2.1 and let you all know what’s been happening with another development log.
Groups of questions in exams
You can now separate the questions in an exam into groups, allowing you to pick a subset from each group at random. This feature was requested by Ione Loots at the University of Pretoria, who wanted a way of showing students a randomly-picked variation of each question in a test. (documentation, issue) Read the rest
We’re happy to announce the release of a Basic LTI 1.1 tool provider for Numbas exams.
One of the more complicated parts of using Numbas is getting it to work with your Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). We designed Numbas to use the SCORM standard, which ideally would allow it to run in any SCORM-compliant VLE without any configuration or input from the server administrator. However, there have always been a couple of wrinkles in that plan: not all VLEs support SCORM, and some of those that claim to don’t do it properly.
Blackboard’s SCORM player has a few long-standing bugs and missing features which mean that we haven’t recommended it for serious use. Since we can’t fix those problems ourselves, we’ve spent a long time trying to find a way work around Blackboard’s problems. Additionally, when a large contingent of Norwegian lecturers visited us for the MatRIC colloquium this April, we discovered that very few institutions in Norway use VLEs which support SCORM. Someone suggested we look at LTI, since many more VLEs seem to support it. Read the rest
The vast majority of development work on the Numbas system has been carried out by the e-learning unit of Newcastle University’s School of Mathematics and Statistics. In particular, almost all the code was written by me.
I’ve set aside time to write up information on how you can get involved with the Numbas project. I’ve greatly expanded our “Contributing to Numbas” page, listing the different ways you can help. I’ll reproduce the top part of that page here:
We encourage any kind of contribution to the Numbas project, whether it’s a bug fix, a new feature or extension, documentation, or just a suggestion of a feature you’d like to have.
We are always interested in feedback from users, especially those with interesting ideas on how to develop and improve the system.
Here’s how you can contribute to the Numbas project
- Report bugs, or suggest features you’d like to see, on our issue trackers.
- Blog about how you use Numbas.
- Write some documentation.
- Add a feature or fix a bug by contributing code.
- Translate Numbas into your language.
Read the rest
You can now embed GeoGebra applets in Numbas questions and, using GeoGebra’s new exercises feature, award the student marks based on constructions within the applet. This is a huge step forward, making it much easier to include interactive diagrams in Numbas questions.
Here’s a video showing how to embed a GeoGebra applet in a Numbas question, and award the student marks if they complete a certain construction. There are even steps, giving marks for each stage of the process!
You can use the values of Numbas question variables in the definitions of objects in the GeoGebra worksheet, meaning that diagrams can accurately reflect the rest of your question.
In this question, the gradient of the slope and coefficient of friction are randomly generated in Numbas, then passed to the GeoGebra applet.
I’ve put together a small demo exam with a couple of questions showing some ways you can use GeoGebra inside Numbas.
To get started using GeoGebra in your own Numbas questions, read the extension’s documentation.
I’m very proud to announce the release of Numbas 2.0, which features a completely rewritten editing interface and a reorganised item database.
We’ve added some very helpful new features, and changed the way the database is organised to make working in groups much easier. All exams and questions in the editor database are now organised into projects, which provide a simple way of collecting together material relating to a particular course or activity in one place.
Projects allow you to automatically grant editing rights to a group of collaborators, keep track of changes that have been made to your content, and filter out irrelevant material. Project-level comments make it easier to coordinate writing, testing, and deployment of questions and exams with your team members.
We’ve rebuilt the editing interface from the ground up, to make it cleaner and easier to use. Read the rest
Good news, everyone! We’ve found a way to get useful information about attempts on Numbas tests out of Blackboard, and present it like this:
The current situation at Newcastle is that all of our in-course Numbas tests which count towards credit are run through a Moodle server set up specifically for the purpose, even though our institutional VLE is Blackboard.
The reason for that boils down to the fact that Blackboard doesn’t make it easy to analyse data to do with SCORM packages: the built-in SCORM reports don’t give much useful information and are tedious to generate, and it’s unclear where in the database the SCORM data lies. If a student claims that their answer was marked incorrectly, we have no way of checking it because Blackboard only gives you the student’s reponse to an interaction, and not the expected response. And sometimes that’s not enough: it’s much easier to work out where a student’s gone wrong if you can load up the test as they saw it. SCORM has a review mode which does that, and while I was able to add support for that to the open-source Moodle server, Blackboard is a black box and brooks no intervention.
Can you work out where this student went wrong?
Read the rest
Here at the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Newcastle University, we provide computer-based assessment through Numbas to all of our first- and second-year undergraduate maths modules, as well as many other courses at later stages or for other schools. We write these questions on a private Numbas editor, so that we don’t accidentally reveal content to students, and so we can control editing access through our centralised IT system.
However, it’s always been our policy that everything we create will end up on the public editor at numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk, shared under a CC-BY licence. It’s been quite a while since we last copied anything over, so I’ve spent this morning copying over just about everything we’ve got. It’s all organised under a new account, Newcastle University Mathematics and Statistics. At the moment, we’ve got 101 exams and 497 questions – that’s a lot of maths!
This academic year we’ve reinvented our first-year syllabus, so at the moment only content for our semester 1 modules is on the public database. All of our second year modules are there, however, as well as third-year courses on group theory, coding theory, and number theory and cryptography. I’ve also transferred each of the exams we’d made available on mathcentre.ac.uk to the school account.
I’ve written a few extensions to add data types and functions necessary for a few of our more advanced courses, which are also available on the editor and on GitHub. They are:
While you can pick and choose from our questions, a good way in is to look at our exams, which collect together questions on similar topics. Our first-year modules have been split up into chapters corresponding to more detailed topics, but the other courses were only collected into weekly assignments, so I’ve just made a single exam for each of those modules, containing all the relevant questions.
