Parameterized exercises in SMC

Abstract

The authoring of parameterized exercises has been a useful activity both for teachers, who could take advantage of databases of parameterized exercises for preparing study materials, but also for students that learn by producing new problems. This has been verified during the realization of MSc dissertations written by High School teachers that, as students again, have written about the positive aspects of their experience in the production of parameterized exercises. Parameterized exercises can also be used in online systems as a secondary study tool for STEM students (such as SIACUA system [2]). With these goals in mind, we have been developing a package named MEGUA to handle databases of parameterized exercises in the SageMath platform for mathematics. During the use of this system we gathered several requests from users claiming a better system. In this paper we present a redefined tool as well as some first opinions on the new facilities. Originally, this package had the old SageMath Notebook [4] as a front-end which has been presented in ICERI 2013 [3]. A new version of this package has been developed for the new platform named “Sage Math Cloud” (SMC) running in a secure and centralized web platform creating, for each new project, a virtual Linux machine with shell command access. In online systems (or cloud), a supervisor could follow student work and help to solve their problems (at distance) since it can see the student work in progress (no need to send emails with attachments).