MathJax

26 June 2012

Monassis release 1.0.5

The next release (version 1.0.5) of the practice server went live today.

The most notable new features are

  • a "Try this question again" button, for when you got a question wrong, read the feedback in the worked solution and want to give it another try with a new random set of numbers.
  • 8 new chapters to practise including
    • Mathematics Grade 10, Finance and growth
    • Mathematics Grade 10, Trigonometry
    • Mathematics Grade 11, Hyperbolic functions and graphs
    • Physical Sciences Grade 10, Electric circuits
    • Physical Sciences Grade 10, Quantitative aspects of chemical change
    • Physical Sciences Grade 11, Quantitative aspects of chemical change
    • Physical Sciences Grade 12, The chemical industry
    • Physical Sciences Grade 12, Electromagnetic radiation
  • Corrections to existing templates, based on comments from our users. The "Report a problem" button is really working and we're able to iron out any remaining problems within 24 hours of a report. Whoever reported the problem gets a personal thank-you note and the other users never even know that there was a problem!
Thanks again to the team of technical content editors for pushing out templates at an alarming rate and welcome to Eric Gulbis who joined us on the 18th!

(P.S. For those who are paying attention: version 1.0.4 was a minor bug-fix release.)

12 June 2012

Monassis release 1.0.3

Another development cycle completed! New user-facing features:
  • A user feedback form for reporting problems with the service or any particular problem. The issues get logged in GitHub and our crack team of technical content editors process them.
  • A "How should I write this?" button that shows the user a short tutorial on the notation for different types of inputs. It is context sensitive, so if you are answering a chemistry problem, it will show you how to write chemical notation. Here's an example for fractions:
  • 12 new chapters available between the 6 books! There are now 438 templates in the database.
 New back-end features:
  • Implemented the <rawvalueof> tag, so that XML can be generated directly using Python.
  • Consolidated the type library and added the chemical equation and string set types.
  • Bugfixes: better scientific notation rendering, changed default numeric error function to relative (rather than absolute), interval parsing failed on + operator.
The next release will focus more on back-end development, although the following user-facing features are high on the list:
  • links from practice problems to the textbook, so that you can review content related to the problem before attempting it;
  • a "Try this question again" button if you want to repeat the same problem, but with a different set of random values.
As always, you can sign up for a free trial at everythingmaths.co.za or everythingscience.co.za.