Proposed collaboration with freemathapp.org, more flexible free response answer collection

[jaltekruse]

Hello WebWork team,

My name is Jason Altekruse and I am the founder of https://freemathapp.org. The site's main focus is enabling students to show math work digitally and give a quick grading experience for instructors. The student experience includes the ability to quickly edit a series of Mathquills or text boxes, along with the ability to upload images or draw on a digital canvas or grid.

The site currently has no back-end and relies on LMSes to transfer files full of student work to teachers for manual grading.

I know lots of institutions like to have at least partly automated grading for assessments, so I'm reaching out to platforms like WebWork to see if you might be interested in embedding the experience from Free Math to give students a more flexible workspace for free response type questions. I have seen that you have an essay question type, and I'm not sure how much it might have changed in version 3. Is it still mostly focused on letting students type a combination of text and latex like in this screenshot? Is there any way for students to draw a graphical response or include an image?

I do know this screenshot is from an old blog, so things might have evolved significantly since this was taken. I'll be downloading the repo and trying to get a local instance running so I can test out the current experience on WebWork.

[dlglin]

Hi Jason,

Your app looks like an interesting complement to WeBWorK. The essay question type in WeBWorK hasn't changed much since the screenshots you posted, at least on the student side. There have been some improvements to the instructor grading interface, but the text entry is basically unchanged. It would be nice to have a more versatile entry interface for students to enter their answers and instructors to enter their feedback.

Note that WeBWorK 3 is not yet up and running, so this repository is probably not the best place for this discussion. A better place would be the discussions in the pg repository https://github.com/openwebwork/pg/discussions. PG is the engine that renders and evaluates problems in WeBWorK and compatible systems, so this tool would probably need to be embedded on the PG side.

[jaltekruse]

Thanks for the pointer to the correct repo @dlglin , glad to hear that you see potential in bringing the two projects together. I have posted over in the discussions page you recommended. It looks like it didn't automatically backlink, so here is where this discussion will likely continue for those who find this thread - openwebwork/pg#671