Spotter
Spotter is software that can check students' answers to symbolic and numerical problems in math and science. It recognizes an answer regardless of the form it's in, and the instructor can put in helpful hints as responses to frequently-occurring mistakes. Symbolic answers can be input in a notation closely resembling normal human math notation (e.g., xy rather than x*y, and sin x instead of sin(x)). Spotter runs as a Perl CGI application on a Web server; the student doesn't need to install any software.
| Tags | education Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL Artistic |
| Operating Systems | Unix |
| Implementation | Perl |
Recent releases
- 07 May 2009 17:23
Changes: This version fixes a bug involving the rendering of some mathematical expressions on the screen, e.g. a variable named "hbar" no longer causes an error.
- 07 Oct 2008 04:42
Changes: This version fixes three bugs. The numerical sampling algorithm uses more samples, making it more robust. A bug has been fixed that made the program give incomplete output in cases where variables were defined, but not given a verbal description, in the XML file. Inverse trig functions are now rendered properly in mathml.
- 06 Oct 2007 16:26
Changes: The code has been cleaned up, and server-side performance has been improved by about a factor of three.
- 08 Sep 2007 14:20
Changes: This version has a performance optimization, and also does a better job of alerting the user if login fails because the user's browser isn't accepting cookies.
- 18 Feb 2007 15:07
Changes: This version adds a general mechanism for creating qualitative questions using JavaScript, and uses that mechanism to implement multiple-choice questions.
