eds.activemath.org

Notes about the ActiveMath Online Tutorial, May 4, 2007

Raw Recordings

Can be found over rtsp in various bandwidths:

• full (1Mb/s): morning, early afternoon,
  late afternoon
• medium (700kb/s): morning, early afternoon,
  late afternoon
• small (800kb/s): morning, early afternoon,
  late afternoon
• tiny (150kb/s): morning, early afternoon,
  late afternoon

I really wish to chapter-tag them, put in a few titles, and cut a few…

Slides

… of this day can be found in the web-space in ppt or in pdf.

Example Content

… was proposed:

• simple-sampler, by Albert, in pdf and its TeX source
• exercise sheet by OTA team in doc

The document simple-sampler was typed live, with the difficulty of having to add many new symbols, a good demonstrator but a wild one. The resulting OQMath file. Note about the many missing geometry symbols: intergeo will certainly change this since OpenMath CDs for geometric constructions is one of the main deliverables.

What happened

• present OTA team, Dieter, Albert
• synced with Skype chat then voice
• discussed the question of Dieter explaining the error seen on this screen.
• presented slides about collections, theories, references and imports
• demoed a few usages of references (DnD of ActiveMath also)
• introduced OpenMath
• explored OpenMath example: ActiveMath (using the context menu), OpenMath website, the ActiveMath symbol-presentation-list
• inserted some math, using OpenMath copy and paste
• introduced QMath, also the QMath symbol types
• produced a few more demoes
• example content request, including some formulæ, was followed up

• got bitten by a copy and paste which contained characters below 32 which jEditOQMath did not show but which made QMath or OQMath break

• introduced the notations elements

• presented how and why to declare new symbols
• set to work to encode the exercises of Albert’s sampler
• made the nice discovery that presenting the notations is really something useful to identify how to input OpenMath (and QMath) expressions
• recalled the content of the collections’ directories
• demoed how to add a new, manually edited table-of-contents as recorded-book
• got bitten by AMATH-1074, which meant that no formula was rendering correctly anymore, workaround introduced
• finalized the encoding of Albert’s sampler; we really need to have better content-dictionaries for elementary-geometry and their notations.

Things to enhance

• several participants complained that running ActiveMath along with Skype conference and receiving the stream was too demanding for their machine
• sometimes the video-compositing of the speaker’s face was covering some of the demonstration slides/screen display
• sometimes the quicktime stream was not loud enough to hear the voice of the participants
• listening to the stream and the skype call does not work… need to mute or cut one of them
• the stream is generally somewhat late, about 5-10s, this lowers the interactivity
• support for participants to do the tasks at the same time should be more explicit, e.g. using the tasks

Revised Schedule of forthcoming tutorials

• We discussed the schedule. We agreed that the next tutorial will be scheduled on Friday May 11th, from 11:00 till 16:30 CET.
• We still need to discuss the suitability of Friday, May 18th.
• We agreed to move the tutorial from Friday, May 25th, to Wednesday, May 23rd.

Material for the next tutorials should also include how to bring ActiveMath to the Web.