News from TMP - 24 February 1995 -------------------------------- Dear All, This is the first newsletter since November. During the last 3 months we've been principally occupied with 3 things: + Assessing and pursuing future funding for the Project. With current funding, our work will effectively terminate in Febuary 1996. We are looking at new and continued sources of funding (a time-consuming task as you are no doubt aware) to at least carry on our work at a "maintainence" level, and hopefully to go on to bigger and better things. + Evaluation: we have processed some 500 hours of raw student session data into a usable form, and passed this together with observations and interviews to our external evaluator. His report will be complete by Easter. + Improvements to modules: in the light of evaluation, we are planning a major set of improvements to the modules. The first task is a revision of the interactive exercises as outlined below. This mailing list has been compiled from people making direct enquiries to TMP, and from email addresses left in the FTP logfile; if you don't wish to receive any further mailings, please let me know [p.kent@ic.ac.uk]. Previous newletters are stored on our server in directory project/Docs/newsletters. ARTICLES BY TMP NOW ON WEB SERVER: A collection of articles written by TMP over the past year is now included in our WWW pages. See the item "Articles written by TMP" on our home page, or go direct to: http://othello.ma.ic.ac.uk/articles/ REVISING THE ROLE OF INTERACTIVE EXERCISES: Our evaluation last term made apparent a number of problems with the interactive exercises in our modules. These are discussed in a short document, accessible as a World-Wide-Web page at: http://othello.ma.ic.ac.uk/articles/Revising-Exercises.html and in PostScript form on our ftp/gopher server in directory: project/Docs/Revising-Exercises.ps We are working on the implementation of the changes as outlined in the document, and the new materials will be available in the next month or so. NEW DIALOG BOX FOR MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS AND BETTER INPUT DIALOG BOX FOR MACINTOSH: In connection with the new-style exercises we have produced a new dialog box for multiple-choice questions. This is included in version 2.0 of the inputbox program, to be found on our gopher/ftp server in directory: project/DialogBox/inputbox2.0 Mac and Unix/XWindows programs are there now; the Windows one is still being debugged (wouldn't you know it). inputbox2.0 implements two MathLink functions, TMPInputBox[] as before and TMPMCQBox[] for multiple-choice input, where the typing input box is replaced by five buttons A, B, C, D and DON'T KNOW. Version 2.0 for Macintosh has corrected the previous problem of a 255 character limit on input and output for the dialogs. inputbox2.0 will be put in the Mac/Unix/Windows materials packages for the next upgrade. Note to XWindows users: I haven't made any progress in porting the inputbox code to platforms other than SGI Irix 4, but it is on my list of things to do..... INTERACTIVE MATHEMATICA ON THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB: We've been exploring the possibilities of linking the Mathematica program to a WWW server, and have some prototype code running on our server to do that. I don't intend providing public access to the prototype at this stage, because it is rather unstable and insecure. However, if you are interested in getting involved with this, please contact me (p.kent@ic.ac.uk). I have been working with Ed Donley, hedonley@grove.iup.edu, who is developing a Mathematica-Notebook-to-HTML converter which he is very kindly offering to the public-domain. He also has produced a WWW-Mathematica link program, and we are both interested in evolving some good public-domain code out of our prototypes. Contributions from skilled Unix programmers are especially welcome. Ed's mma2html and link programs can be downloaded at: ftp://ftp.ma.iup.edu/pub/mma2html/ FEEDBACK: We appreciate very much all comments and suggestions about our materials, be they good or bad, superficial or profound. If you do download and look at our stuff, please spend a few minutes collecting your thoughts, pressing computer keys, and sending the result to us (tranmath-proj@ic.ac.uk). As a short-term project looking to renew its funding this year, we need to know if we have any "customers" out there. OUR ADDRESSES ------------- Phillip Kent, Phil Ramsden and John Wood, Transitional Mathematics Project, Mathematics Department, Imperial College, London SW7 2BZ. Tel: +44 (0)171 594 8503, Fax: +44 (0)171 594 8517. E-mail: tranmath-proj@ic.ac.uk . Gopher and FTP to: othello.ma.ic.ac.uk (155.198.192.26). World-Wide-Web at URL http://othello.ma.ic.ac.uk/ . Please send *technical* questions about WWW/gopher/ftp and the TMP software direct to p.kent@ic.ac.uk .