On 12/2/2010 12:52 AM, Chris Sangwin wrote:...
...
>
> The library I have written already does these sorts of things. I know
> how difficult Maxima can be with simp:false. I've battled against it
> quietly for the last 5 years! And it now mostly works very well.
> 1000s of students are using these functions everyday and having useful
> feedback provided to their online quizzes. See
> http://web.mat.bham.ac.uk/C.J.Sangwin/Publications/2010-3-1-STACK.pdf
I'm impressed by this -- it is far more sophisticated than I thought!
(Some examples' English is kind of stilted. Finnish-English translation?).
The major difficulty appears to be getting various systems to work
together, and to get material from other
sources (e.g. MapleTA) to work with STACK, too.
Still, running Maxima with the simplifier off, and then perhaps turning
it on in bursts, does not
seem to match what you really need. Given that, it is interesting that
you were able to do
so much.
It is, I think, important to realize that one (perhaps the only?)
plausible "killer app" for computer algebra
systems is "math education". There are far more calculus or
pre-calculus students than
researchers using advanced math. And at least some of those researchers
combine unfortunate
traits: obstinate+unwilling to read documentation + unwilling to pay [
to support further development or
commercialization etc.]
RJF
PS, I remember seeing an interactive system to teach Lisp. I don't know
if it ever worked for students,
but I found it irritating because the solutions that I offered to the
questions were graded wrong
because I wrote more advanced solutions than the grading program
anticipated.