The Numbas Blog

New tools to test generated variables

One thing that many people have asked for over the years is the ability to check whether the variables generated by a question have a desired property, and “re-roll” them if not. I’ve been reluctant to implement this because it can lead to sloppy question design when a method that’s guaranteed to work can often be found with a little bit of thinking.

Read the rest

Development log – November 2014: version tracking!

Here’s another round-up of recent development work on Numbas.

Version tracking

The big new feature is version tracking – every change made to a Numbas question or exam is saved in the database, and you can revert to old versions in the new “Editing history” tab. Read the rest

Development log – September 2014

Here’s another round-up of the development work on Numbas in the past month-and-a-bit.

A little attribution

I’ve added a small attribution footer to the bottom of the default theme. It looks like this:

created using numbas

Now that people can upload their own themes, we wanted an unobtrusive way of noting that tests are built using Numbas. If you don’t want it there, you can use a modified theme to remove it, but we’d prefer you kept it. Read the rest

Responsive layout on mobile devices

On small screens (tablets and phones, mainly), the default Numbas theme didn’t used to leave much space for the question content.

I’ve spent the past couple of days making the theme responsive, so screens less than 980px wide switch to a more vertical layout. The question menu and pause/end buttons move beneath the content area, and the banner is more vertical too. This means the content area can have the full width of the page. Read the rest

Upload your own extensions to the Numbas editor

A couple of weeks ago I made it possible to upload your own themes to the editor, so it makes sense to also allow you to upload your own extensions.

Extensions in Numbas can affect any part of the Numbas runtime. Typically, that means adding new functions in JME or javascript (or even a new JME data type) to avoid repeating the same code across several questions.

I’ve written some instructions on how to write an extension, along with a couple of examples, in the Numbas documentation.

Upload your own themes to the Numbas editor

Numbas has always had support for themes, allowing you to completely change how exams are displayed. The Numbas editor, however, only supported a static list of themes installed by the server administrator, so most users were stuck with the default themes.

I’ve just released an update to the Numbas editor which allows any user to upload a .zip package of their own theme, which they can then use in any exam. You could use this to do something simple such as show your institution’s logo instead of the Numbas one, or add some CSS rules to tweak the layout of the page.

I’ve written some brief instructions on how to create your own themes, along with a couple of simple examples, in the Numbas documentation.

Kingston University, London

James Denholm-Price has been using Numbas to test first year Linear Algebra students for more than two years.

Adopting Numbas allowed James to replace his multiple-choice paper question sheets with online tests, giving students the chance to test their knowledge of the subject using tests that changed each time.

The randomly-generated questions reduced the risk of copying, and up to 94% of students participated in the practice tests.

Teachers were able to test new e-assessment questions “live” before adding them to final summative assessments.

Royal Darwin Hospital

Clinical Nurse Educator Antony Robinson used Numbas to test new emergency nurses at the Royal Darwin Hospital in Australia.

Antony adapted the tool to help new additions to the hospital’s emergency department to interpret results from an electrocardiogram, a device which measures the electrical activity of the heart.

Nurses were shown a quiz featuring animated heart rhythms, and had to answer a series of questions on what they saw before interpreting the rhythm itself.

Antony said he used Numbas for the tests as it was flexible enough to meet his needs.

“The commercial tools weren’t able to provide for this use case easily”, he said.

Dominicus College

Carolijn Tacken teaches maths to classes of 12 to 18-year-old students in the Netherlands.

As many of her class use technology to research and learn, she wished to create quizzes that would reinforce the lessons in each chapter of their textbooks.

Using Numbas, she has created tests to help her students prepare for exams. Some have been uploaded to the school’s Virtual Learning Environment, while others have been added to iBooks and shared using Dropbox.

“It’s great that Numbas works on many different platforms, as a lot of my students have iPads”, she said.

University of Leicester

Alex Goddard had recently joined the university as part of the teaching team in the Department of Chemistry. He was keen to give students a way to supplement their learning with online self-check tests.

“I was advised to use Numbas for this purpose, and got to grips with it after playing around with it for a few days”, he said.

Writing the majority of questions himself, he offered the tests to students in the university’s Virtual Learning Environment.

He hopes to roll the tests out to more year groups, and deliver tests on different topics in future.