MathJax

28 November 2011

Funded

As you can see from the logo to the right, the Shuttleworth Foundation has very generously provided some funding towards the development of Monassis! The funding is part of their mini-grant programme.

This is great news for since I'll be able to spend more time on development and perhaps even a bit of money on hardware. Since I'm developing the platform for both browsers and fairly low-end mobile devices, it's important to be able to test on these.

Thanks SF and thanks Kathi for the nomination!

02 November 2011

Keen teachers create Monassis templates

I have to admit that I was skeptical when Mark suggested that we let teachers try their hand at creating templated questions for Monassis. To give you an idea: this requires writing at least a Python file (for the question logic) and a XML file (for the question layout and scripting the user responses and feedback). There is also the option of writing some ASCIIsvg to generate graphs client-side, at run time, based on the values generated in the Python script. Oh, and I nearly forgot, you have to write LaTeX to get the mathematics right.

All in all, no easy task.

But, a few hours later, all of them had successfully created their own templated questions. With graphs and everything!

Looks like I'm going to have to rethink my stance on distributed volunteer creation of templated questions.