Support

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.

We’ve decided to start running weekly “open office” hours each Thursday. You can make an appointment to talk with the lead developer of Numbas, Christian Lawson-Perfect, about anything to do with Numbas.

Meetings will normally take place over Zoom, unless you specify a different method.

You could get help writing questions, integrating Numbas with your VLE, or have a more wide-ranging chat about using Numbas.

To make an appointment, use the booking form.

With version 9.1 SP6, Blackboard finally fixed their SCORM player. That means that you can upload Numbas exams to Blackboard and it will save students’ grades into the Grade Center, just like any other assignment. Earlier versions claimed to support SCORM, but the implementation was quite broken.

In this post I’ll walk you through the process of putting a Numbas exam on Blackboard. Read the rest