User talk:Alfred

Hi Alfred,

You forgot that you guys are not allowed calculators during exams. This changes how to answer part b quite a lot! Cheers, David

Hi Alfred,

Continuing my previous post about what else could be done on the MER project, there is that idea of having Summary pages. I've created a template for that which is embedded on pages such as Science:Math_Exam_Resources/Courses/MATH101/April_2008/Summary using the Template:MER Exam Content.

All those pages usually inside of the Category:MER Exam Summary (though I realize now that it needs to be added separately, I should have made that part of the template... that's something to improve)

Issues so far are that it is not printable using the wiki books tool (in the left side bar) or the save as a pdf tool also on the left (when in a regular page) (also, that's not surprising since that function basically prints a one page book, so it's the same issue for both cases). What happens is that it comes blank. The wiki admin is busy for a month and not quite sure what to do since he doesn't control that plugin. What works, is to actually print the page (ctrl+p) and save that as a pdf. But it's quite ugly (some web headers and footers come along usually)

We're not quite sure what the goal of all this is and we haven't publicized this tool for now. I'm not a huge fan of printing paper anyway, but we though it would be nice to have something of that kind. If you have any ideas or suggestions, feel free to play with it.

Sure. That sounds pretty interesting. It might be a good resource for professors to distribute to students or just for students to print out so they could write on it concretely.

So if the purpose of the summary pages is to be printed, should we leave it as one continuous page or format it in some way (I'm not sure how to do this though) so that each question prints out on its own page?

I'm not that keen at creating a document that would print this much paper. If anything, we should try our best to reduce paper waste by coding something that makes sense.

The other idea someone suggested was to have it printed with all questions first, all hints and then all solutions.

Nobody wants to waste paper, but I think that nobody would want to print out the whole set all at once... So it really depends who this is targeted for. If it was meant to be printed all at once, that last idea (printing hints and solutions at the back) sounds good.

Not sure what the target really is. We could try to ask students to actually know if we are working towards something that is really useful.

Yeah, I guess once we do the big release announcement (have you done it yet?), we can also do a poll afterwards regarding students' and professors' use of the site.

Hi Alfred,

Just saw you added an item to the to do list! Love it! Any idea how we can do this? Difficulties that I see are mainly due to the inconsistent numbering. We also are looking at a solution that would be implemented directly at the level of the general template and hence are not looking at something that would be manually added.

Any ideas are welcomed!

I think we would have to do this manually. I looked at the template for the exam pages (such as http://wiki.ubc.ca/Science:Math_Exam_Resources/Courses/MATH100/December_2011, and in the code there is an "exam_link" attribute, which inputs into the template to produce the URL of the PDF, and I thought we could do something similar with the question page templates? So it would look something like
"{{MER Question page|prev=Question_1_(c)|next=Question_1_(e)}}"
The links could be placed in a bar above the question statement, and it could look something like:

◂ Previous Question

Next Question ▸

It's neat, but doesn't sound realistic. We are dealing with a few exam pages, but the number of question pages right now is above 600. I don't see how we can sustainably make those manual modifications. And in comparison to the benefits which are fairly poor since students have access to all the questions links on the side bar (on the right).

The DPL code (for search purposes) manages to order the question pages correctly, there might be a way to ask him what is the pages that naturally comes "after" a given one. How much do you know about DPL?

Not a whole lot. I guess you're right then, that it would be indeed too tedious to manually go through all the pages.

Have a look at that DPL code sometimes. It's what I use to create lists and counters in many templates. Worth getting a bit familiar with.

Yeah, I saw the DPL list in the sidebar. I'll take a look at that. Are there any resources where I could learn from?

Looking at your work for example here: Science:Math_Exam_Resources/Courses/MATH100/December_2011/Question_1_(l) here is some suggestions that I took from the wikipedia math community:

• Try to only have the variables in italics, so type ''x''(2) = ''a'' instead of ''x(2) = a''
• And as much as possible, try to use ƒ instead of f (the & fnof ; HTML symbol).

Otherwise, good job! This MATH100 exam is slowly improving!

Sure!