Interactive Exercises

This page describes the two methods to edit interactive exercises.

Interactive Exercises are OMDocs

ActiveMath interactive exercises are also OMDoc documents and can, thus, also be edited in source form with jEditOQMath and its support for the DTD.

This is slightly not optimal if using a DTD that supports old and new encodings of exercises…

This is also less then optimal if authoring complex exercises with many states. Authoring these becomes quickly a strong goto-programming-exercise.

Using the extasy authoring tool in collections

The extasy authoring tries to solve this within a browser-based visual authoring tool. If you are registered as an author (see the tutorial), you can open the URL /ActiveMath2/exercises/repository.cmd which will allow you to create new exercises presenting a graph of the interactions and their transitions. As of this writing the authoring tool requires the Mozilla browsers, with applets, on Windows or Linux.

Once you are done with an exercise in extasy, integrating the content into your collection is done in the following few steps which will try to make a readable OQMath file:

• download the OMDoc file from extasy and save it within the oqmath directory of your collection. Doing so guarantees that you save your files in a directory of “sources” whereas the omdoc directory is on that can be cleaned up from time to time.
• open this file in jEditOQMath and invoke Plugins > OQMath > Clean up OMDoc. This will try to insert a DTD reference, if a DTD is found, will reindent an amount of the XML, and will try to remove most of the namespace declarations. You may avoid to this if not wishing to modify things by hand.

The resulting file now enters the normal publication process of the collection and should be easily integratable in table-of-contents. Updates to this file can be done in jEditOQMath or extasy, in the latter case, the file should be re-uploaded.

Enhancements Planned

We expect the following enhancements to happen which should shorten this page and better integrate extasy and jeditoqmath:

• extasy will produce files which are more readable and may avoid needing the clean-up. It will save directly within collections that allow it to do so and will enable automated reload of the content-store
• jEditOQMath will integrate the graphical interactions’ browser of extasy (or another) which should considerably lower the lack of overview typicaly of the goto-programming-syndrom of exercise authoring.