Hi, as for your first problem, I guess the following will do it (I haven't checked, though. Sorry, but I don't want to go through the nuisance of writing some code, upload it to the brownstone webpage, download the edu, upload it to MapleTA etc. I guess you know what I mean ...): Define in the \code-section $tolerance = ...; $upperlimit = 1+$tolerance; $lowerlimit = 1-$tolerance; and then have in the \begin{sketch}-section \check{value(...)<\var{upperlimit} && value(...)>\var{lowerlimit}} As for your second problem, I guess this will not be possible because the only operations available seem to be ==, <, >, && and ||. I would like to add a general caveat: Sketch the graph-questions will not work with JRE1.5 under MapleTA2.0. So if one of your students has JRE1.5 on his machine, he/she will be doomed. Things might be better with MapleTA2.5, which I can't tell as I pretty early abandoned it. The reason is that MapleTA2.5 is not backwards compatible in many respects. Peter

Hi Marc, here is an idea that might help you with the first item on your list: Create a Maple initialization file (see "Create Maple Initialization File" in Maple Help) into which you place mapleml:=proc(input) printf(MathML:-ExportPresentation(input)); end proc; This initialization file will be read whenever you call Maple from within MapleTA and will make the command mapleml available. Note that you would still have to type maple("mapleml(...)") but this is quite an improvement as compared to maple("printf(MathML:-ExportPresentation(...))") Two words of caution: 1. I haven't tested this. If you try and it actually works I would appreciate if you spread the news. 2. I don't like the above proposal, quite to the contrary. If you ever want to share question banks you have authored you have to ask people to load your initialization file (or do other workarounds). And than I am not sure about the amount of computational overhead this will produce. Hope this will help, Peter

Once I had submitted my posting it stroke me: Here is how derivatives of random order ARE possible: $n = range(2,5,1); $function = maple("diff(x^5,[seq(x,i=1..$n)])"); Not very nice nor readable, though. But no $-char is needed. Clear and effective coding in Maple T.A. would be so easy if ALL computations would be done using Maple. Mind-blowing mixtures of Maple code and the very rudimentary Maple T.A. "programming language" wouldn't be necessary and solve all sorts of dialy problems (cf. also Marc Renault's recent posting of Nov 7, 2005). My sugestion: A quick (and somewhat dirty) way of making this possible would be to make Maple repositories accessible from within the algorithm section.