Show HN: Open Notebook – Software for creating digital math worksheets | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Open Notebook – Software for creating digital math worksheets

jaltekruse.github.io

50 pointsjaltekruse10 comments

Hello all, as it's a show HN post it's kind of implied, but I am the author of the project. Please feel free to leave feedback or ask questions here. Thanks so much for checking out the project, be sure to share it on your social networks with your friends with an interest in education!

Definitely a needed product. I've seen too many people creating geometry tests in M$Word. Would be great to see this actively developed. For now, I noticed that x^2 leaves a space between x and the superscript 2. Would be a (hopefully easy) improvement to have the space removed.

Thanks! I just pushed a commit to fix it. I actually destabilized it a little when I refactored to start writing unit tests. I won't be publishing a new binary right away, but it should be soon. Also working on a cert to avoid the unknown developer warning.

Great! I already found the variable that defines the space to add before an exponent and recompiled and it works great now. It would also be nice if variables were displays in a maths font (or at least in italics). Looks like you've done quite a bit of the rendering work from scratch though so maybe this is more difficult.

This looks pretty interesting. It looks like the main use case is to make worksheets that students have to solve. I feel like this project shares a lot in common with ipython notebook[1], though I don't know of a way to publish interactive notebooks. There would also be a bit of a learning curve to understand python. Still, I wonder if it could be done, something similar to nbviewer[2].

Imagine if this notebook (http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/jckantor/CBE20255/blob/ma...) could be interactive, leaving a blank cell for the solution and students could fill it in and save it. If you distribute the file, students could run it, once they installed python/ipython. Or, one of the cloud IDEs (c9.org)

1: ipython notebook - https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/A-gallery-of-interes...

2: nbviewer - http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/

Very interesting project, since it combines an authoring tool for teachers, printable worksheet generator functionality, and "quiz tool" for students to use.

The random problem generation functionality in particular is very powerful. It reminds me to the random problem generation API in the khan-exercises framework, but with a different interface. Instead of requiring teachers to learn JavaScript to generate problems, they just have to learn how to use the problem generators for different type of problems. Generating generators for all kinds of math problems will be a lot of work, still, it's nice to see a new take on the problem.

Another promising project in the same space is https://ximera.osu.edu/ [latex --> (js,pdf) exercise generator]

Thank you for the kinds words, I did try to put a lot of thought into the feature set to make it useful.

I have seen a number of tools that are similar, one way I wanted to set this project apart was with a simple interface that even non-technical teachers could use. I decided early on I wanted the application to be latex-free. Creating the equation renderer from scratch was a bit of overkill (the engineer mindset "oh it'll be easier to write myself"). This is something I hope fix and instead plug in a more complete and better tested alternative like JLatexMath, with actual editing capabilities. Pulling the editor out of this application looks promising http://mirai.sourceforge.net/.

If you look at Khan-Exercises they have actually moved away from automatic generation (see their Perseus project), because it was too hard to write the kinds of problems they wanted. Also internationalization when the content of the questions was dynamic caused them more hassle than it was worth. I am considering de-emphasizing content creation and focusing on the student solution interface, as I believe it is the more novel feature of the system. But for now I wanted to get some teachers using it and find out what they found useful.

Video Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnBE76kY2cw

This is nice, a bit similar to DIA or Visio, relatively intuitive.

Would love to have a web-based system that can generate worksheets and grade them.

Thanks for trying it out! We are working on integrating the software with Moodle and other course management systems so that I don't have to force schools to adopt a new service grade the assignments.

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