I think we all know the routine. We walk to a large classroom, we sit down for a test, we receive a large stack of questions stapled together and then we fill in tiny bubbles on a separate sheet that is automatically graded by a scanning machine. We’ve all been there. I was thinking recently about how far the humble multiple choice question has come over the last few years with the advent of systems like Maple T.A., and so I did a little research.

Multiple choice questions were first widely-distributed during World War I to test the intelligence of recruits in the United States of America. The army desired a more efficient way of testing as using written and oral evaluations was very time consuming. Dr. Robert Yerkes, the psychologist who convinced the army to try a multiple choice test, wanted to convince people that psychiatry could be a scientific study and not just philosophical. A few years later, SATs began including multiple choice questions. Since then, educational institutions have adopted multiple choice questions as a permanent tool for many different types of assessments.

One of the biggest advances in the use of multiple choice questions was the birth of automatic grading through the use of machine-readable papers. These grew in popularity during the mid-70s as teachers and instructors saved time by not having to grade answer sheets manually.

Until recently, there has not been much advancement in this area.  It’s true, Maple T.A. can do so much more than just multiple choice questions, so this style of question is less important in large-scale testing than it used to be. But multiple choice questions still have their place in an automated testing system, where uses include leveraging older content, easily detecting patterns of misunderstanding, requiring students to choose from different images, and minimizing student interaction with the system. Luckily, Maple T.A. takes even the humble multiple choice questions to the next level. Now you might be thinking, how is that even possible given the basic structure of multiple choice questions? What could possibly be done to enhance them?

Well, for starters, in Maple T.A., you can permute the answers. This means you have the option to change the order of the choices for each student. This is also possible with machine-readable papers, but this does require multiple solution sets for a teacher or instructor to keep track of. With Maple T.A., everything is done for you. For example, if you have a multiple choice question in Maple T.A. with 5 answer choices, there are 120 different possible answer orders that students can be presented with. You don’t have to keep track of extra solution sets or note which test version each student is receiving. Maple T.A. takes care of it all.

Maple T.A. allows you to create Algorithmic questions - multiple choice questions in which you can vary different values in your question. And you aren’t limited to selecting values from a specific range, either. For example, you can select a random integer from a pre-defined list, a random number that satisfies a mathematical condition, such as ‘divisible by 3’ or ‘prime’, or even a random polynomial or matrix with specific characteristics. It allows an instructor to create a single question template, but have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of possible question outcomes based on the randomly selected values for the algorithmic variables. The algorithmic variables not only apply to the question being asked by a student, but also the choices they see in a multiple choice question.

You can even create a question where every student gets the same fixed list of choices, but the question varies to ensure that the correct response changes.  That’s going to confuse some students who are doing a little more “collaboration” than is appropriate!

Some of the other advantages of using Maple T.A. for multiple choice are also common to all Maple T.A. question types. For example, you can provide instant, customized feedback to your students. If a student gets a multiple choice question correct, you can provide feedback showing the solution (who is to say the student didn’t guess and get this question correct?) If a student gets a multiple choice question incorrect, you can provide targeted feedback that depends on which response they chose. This allows you to customize exactly what a student sees in regards to feedback without having to write it out by hand each time.

And of course, like in other Maple T.A. questions, multiple choice questions can include mathematical expressions, plots, images, audio clips, videos, and more – in the questions and in the responses.      

Finally, let’s not forget, in an online testing environment, there is no panic when you realized you accidently skipped line 2 while filling out your card, no risk of paper cuts, and no worrying about what kind of pencil to use!

References:

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/dark-history-of-multiple-choice-ainissa-ramirez

http://xkcd.com/499/

http://io9.com/5908833/the-birth-of-scantrons-the-bane-of-standardized-testing

Yesterday afternoon, we updated MaplePrimes. The purpose of the update was primarily to squash some bugs and improve user experience.

Highlights of the update include:

• The ordering of replies has been corrected, as described in this post by Carl Love.
  
  
• We fixed a problem whereby some members were unable to attach a file to a question or post.
  
  
• Flagging a comment now works correctly.
  
  
• Broken images that were appearing on some of our older posts have been restored. In addition, some older posts had incorrect dates, and these have been restored.
  
  
• Some embedded links to user profiles or messages were resulting in errors, and have been corrected.
  
  
• After receiving a badge, members will now be notified via a pop-up message.

A number of other small improvements were made as well.

As always, thank you for letting us know when you encounter a problem, and please continue to do so. We take note of everything that you report, and we try our best to prioritize and take care of the issues.

Bryon

Voting is now open for the next individual prize to be awarded as part of the Möbius App Challenge.  The winner will receive an Xbox One Prize Pack! 

Here are the finalist Apps:

• Fixed Point Equation
• Testing Convergence of a Series
• Mod-N-Calulator
• Epsilon-delta Limit Definition

Note that, if you ever have any problems viewing Apps in your browser, or simply want to work offline, you can always download a Möbius App and view it in Maple or the free Maple Player. To download a Möbius App, follow the link to the App and then click on the Download button near the top left of the page.

You can vote for your favorite through our Facebook page or, if you’re not on Facebook, send an email with your vote to Mobius-Project@maplesoft.com.

And remember, we are now accepting entries for the next quarterly prize. You could win a Music Prize Pack, including the 64GB 5th Generation Apple iPod Touch, Sennheiser In-Ear Noise Cancelling Headphones and the Bose SoundLink Bluetooth Speaker III!  See the Möbuis App Challenge for details.

Voting closes April 25^th, 2014.

This is a little more than a new game it potentially uncovers a new class of numbers -- though determining membership might become a hard problem.

A number that possesses the solitaire property can be written in as ...,0,...1,...2,...etc, or ...,0,...1,...10...11,...etc,(where the "0" is the first zero in the number), with a radix point anywhere. We are free to pick the base and say it is solitaire with respect to that base. After the initial 0, the subsequent ordinals (the 1,2, etc or the 1,10,11, etc) used to write the solitaire number don't have to be the first ones. For example:

pi=3.1415926535897932384626433832795
0 2884
1 971693993751058
2 0974944592
3 078163860
4 ...
etc.,

or

pi=3.1415926535897932384626433832795

0 2884197

1 6939937510582 097494459

2 3 07816

3 860
4 ...
etc.,are both acceptable. (If the number can be written as  ...,0,...1,...2,...etc, or ...,0,...1,...10...11,...etc. it is solitaire.)

The Champernowne constant with respect to base 10 has only one representation:

0.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11...

etc. .

I know Base 10 Champernowne constant is base 10 solitaire. I can not say the same with certainty for Pi.

I also propose we can measure the solitude of a number by the average amount of numbers between the 0,1,2,3..., and give a perfect solitude score to Base 10 Champernowne constant. Other constants can be given additional credit, of some kind, if the amounts of numbers between the 1,2,3... follow a specific preset pattern.

marvinrayburns.com

With the package VectorCalculus we can study the speed and acceleration to their respective components. Considering the visualizaccion and algebraic calculations and to check with their respective commands. Both 2D and 3D.

Velocidad-Aceleració.mw     (in spanish)

Lenin Araujo Castillo

Physics Pure

Computer Science

The attached presentation is the last one of a sequence of three on Quantum Mechanics using Computer Algebra, covering the field equation for a quantum system of identical particles, its stationary solutions and the equations for small perturbations around them and, in this third presentation, the conditions for superfluidity of such a system of identical particles at low temperature. The novelty is again in how to tackle these problems in a computer algebra worksheet.

Download QuantumMechanics3.mw   QuantumMechanics3.pdf

Edgardo S. Cheb-Terrab
Physics, Maplesoft

Funciones.mw ...............................................................

As a reminder, we regularly host live webinars on a variety of topics for our customers, and we wanted to make this information available to the MaplePrimes community as well.

This featured webinar for this month will outline the Finance Package in Maple 18 including capabilities like the mathematical, statistical, and connectivity tools required to analyse data, calculate forecasts, estimate risks, prototype and develop quantitative algorithms, and leverage parallel programming techniques.

Other topics include:

• Data feed connectivity and system integration

• Price equity and interest rate derivatives

• Populate reporting tools, deliver documents and share worksheets

• Optimize portfolios of financial instruments

• High-Performance Computing (HPC)

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

I'll start with a quick positive.  One of the great advantages of upgraded software is the wealth of new features that we all get to play around with.  .. and then I will counter that with a great disadvantage, and that is, we all just about get familiar and comfortable with all the new features then BAM! a new version is released.  Of course we're then mesmorized once again by all the new bells and whistles and maybe even a couple of great celebrations occur with nice small updates throughout the year.  The other downside is that even though a large number of bugs may have been fixed a number of new ones are broght in with those new features. 

A side effect of a fast release is there are fewer and fewer applications associated with a release, and that is apparent in the application center.  Although mobius apps and the maple cloud may have also had some impact on that as well.

Now this is pale in comparison to book writers who scramble to keep their books current with new software.  I will quote a section from the introduction in the book Essential Maple 7 which highlights the problems the author had way back then .. I can't imagine how they feel now but here's the passage ...

"Indeed, one reason that there was so much time between the first and second
editions of this book is precisely that Maple has been evolving so rapidly in the
last few years, too rapidly for me to revise this book (much less complete my
others) while coping with my other duties."

That just hits the nail on the head, if you think Maple was evolving fast back then, the furious rate that upgrades are released now I would think authors have an almost impossible task to keep up. 

There are many that would agree with the author, that Maple is advancing so rapidly that we barely have time to gather our thoughts.  Maybe a solution is that we should slow down and create a much more polished piece of software, but again the caveat to that is our competition might just jump out in front.  However the norm today is that each new year represents a new release of software and we all celebrate when that happens.  If life seemed rushed back when Maple 7 was released I can't imagine what it'll be like 10 years from now when Maple 28 rolls around. 

Addition, subtraction, scalar product, vector, projections and graphs with physics packages and plots. With this you can begin to start the physics course for engineering.

Operaciones_con_Vect.mw   (in spanish)

Lenin Araujo Castillo

Physics Pure

Computer Science

Greetings to all.

I would like to share a brief observation concerning my experiences with the Euler-Maclaurin summation routine in Maple 17 (X86 64 LINUX). The following Math StackExchange Link shows how to compute a certain Euler-MacLaurin type asymptotic expansion using highly unorthodox divergent series summation techniques. The result that was obtained matches the output from eulermac which is definitely good to know. What follows is the output from said routine.

> eulermac(1/(1+k/n),k=0..n,18);
     1       929569        3202291        691                O(1)
O(- ---) - ----------- + ----------- - --------- + 1/1048576 ----
     19             15            17          11              19
    n      2097152 n     1048576 n     32768 n               n

                                           n
                                          /
        174611      5461        31       |      1           17        1
     - -------- + --------- + ------- +  |   ------- dk - ------- + ------
             19          13         9    |   1 + k/n            7        5
       6600 n     65536 n     4096 n    /                 4096 n    256 n
                                          0

         1       1
     - ------ + ---- + 3/4
            3   16 n
       128 n

While I realize that this is good enough for most purposes I have two minor issues.

• One could certainly evaluate the integral without leaving it to the user to force evaluation with the AllSolutions option. One can and should make use of what is known about n and k. In particular one can check whether there are singularities on the integration path because we know the range of k/n.
• Why are there two order terms for the order of the remainder term? There should be at most one and a coefficient times an O(1) term makes little sense as the coefficient would be absorbed.

You might want to fix these so that the output looks a bit more professional which does enter into play when potential future users decide on what CAS to commit to. Other than that it is a very useful routine even for certain harmonic sum computations where one can use Euler-Maclaurin to verify results.

Best regards,

Marko Riedel

It seems that

Limit(N+(sum((-1)^n*Sum(1/n^x, x = 1 .. N), n = 1 .. infinity)), N = infinity)=log(2)

 evalf(300+sum((-1)^n*(Sum(1/n^x, x = 1 .. 300)), n = 1 .. infinity), 30)

gives

0.693147180559945309417232121.

 sum(1/n^x, x = 1 .. infinity)

gives

1/(n-1).

In Maple 18, the Database package has been updated to include support for SQlite databases as well as a new option for plots to change the background images on plots.  To showcase both of these features, our engineering team put together an example that optimizes the flight path of a pan-US delivery drone.

This application extracts the latitude and longitude of those zip codes from an SQLlite database (the application includes the database, which cross-references US zip codes against their latitude, longitude, city and state). The application then performs a traveling salesman optimization and plots the shortest path on a map of the US.

To download the application click here: PanUSDeliveryDro.zip

This is a 5-days mini-course I gave in Brazil last week, at the CBPF (Brazilian Center for Physics Research). The material will still receive polishment and improvements, towards evolving into a sort of manual, but it is also interesting to see it exactly as it was presented to people during the course. This material uses the update of Physics available at the Maplesoft Physics R&D webpage.

BrasilComputacaoAlgebrica.mw.zip

BrasilComputacaoAlgebrica.pdf 

Edgardo S. Cheb-Terrab
Physics, Maplesoft

We regularly host live webinars on a variety of topics for our customers, and we wanted to make this information available to the MaplePrimes community as well. We will be posting information about new webinars we think will be of interest approximately once per month.

Partnering with the MAA to Revolutionize Placement Testing

In this webinar, we will demonstrate how the Maple T.A. MAA Placement Test Suite can be used to ease the problem of placement testing and how it can benefit your campus in general.

Other topics include:

• How placement testing contributes to student success

• How the MAA placement tests are created, and rigorously validated

• How valid and reliable the MAA placement tests are for entry level mathematics courses

• How you can use the Maple T.A. Placement Test Suite for easy administration, flexible delivery, and fast results

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.