Flash cards

[Alex Jordan]

I'm at the eLearning conference and I went to a bunch of OER sessions. One example had a feature we may want to think about. I think it goes along with the index discussion. At the end of a section or chapter, you could have some kind of flash card feature (for us, knowls-based; theirs was a kind of applet). Vocab list; list of definitions; list of theorems; etc. Maybe that has always been a goal: a list of whatevers at the end of a section. But the thought of a reader using such a thing as flash cards hadn't occurred to me. I was thinking of that as a reference tool.

Recording the idea for future reference.

[Rob Beezer]

Dear Alex,

Way ahead of you. Flash cards are so 2000's. January 18, 2005, to be exact. ;-)

http://linear.ups.edu/download/fcla-flash-0.30.pdf

Shortly after starting the linear algebra book, a student came into an exam with
handwritten flash cards of all the theorems. (Likely it was a good exercise to
have written them out.) I thought, "I've got enough structure to rip all those
out with sed and regular expressions and make a massive LaTeX file with all the
necessary macros, etc." You will recognize the progenitor of the mbx script.
I think this was my first non-standard text processing experiment, and long a
favorite example.

And literally right now, I am working on lists of whatever (essentially done,
but adding optional behaviors). My lists are document-wide, but maybe
per-subdivision would be even better (and perhaps very easy to implement). Good
suggestion.

But maybe something even more interactive (randomized order?) would be useful.
Sounds like a good student project - mine the source for content to supply to an
in-browser Javascript study aid.

Rob

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[Karl-Dieter Crisman]

But maybe something even more interactive (randomized order?) would be useful.
Sounds like a good student project - mine the source for content to supply to an
in-browser Javascript study aid.

+1 to this

[Bob Plantz]

"...a student came into an exam with handwritten flash cards of all the theorems.  (Likely it was a good exercise to have written them out.)"

In the Preface of my book, Introduction to Computer Organization, I say, "If you have an electronic copy of this book, do not copy and paste code. Think about it — typing in the code forces you to read every single character. Yes, it is very tedious, but you will learn much more this way. I’m assuming here that your goal is to learn the material, not simply to get the example programs to work. They are rather silly programs, so just getting them to work is not of much use."

I'm projecting here. Copying equations when I was in school (long before computer code was common) was an important learning tool for me. Perhaps it's not as helpful to others, but I don't think it hurts. My experience causes me some concern about the efficacy of today's copy-and-paste culture in education.

--Bob Plantz

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> <mailto:mathbook-xml-support+unsub...@googlegroups.com>.

[Alex Best]

But maybe something even more interactive (randomized order?) would be useful.
Sounds like a good student project - mine the source for content to supply to an
in-browser Javascript study aid.

I hacked something like this together when I was revising for some courses I took last year (that I was writing mbx notes for).

And in fact I just checked and it is still running at https://alexjbest.pythonanywhere.com/.

It is built using Django, a Python web framework.

Every night a script git pulls my github repository that has my notes in and then reloads the database from the mbx xml files, adding questions for definitions (define: foo), propositions (prove: bar) and named propositions (state: foobar's theorem).

These are then displayed in a random order, and the user can visit a subdirectory corresponding to a single mbx source to just get questions loaded from that source, e.g. https://alexjbest.pythonanywhere.com/localfields/.

It's not the prettiest thing ever as it was really only intended for me to use on my phone when in the queue for lunch etc. but it worked reasonably well (excluding commutative diagrams...).

The source is at https://github.com/alexjbest/blota/ (I think the meat of the program is the file /question/management/commands/recreate.py which loads an mbx file into the database, the rest is just gets random questions and displays them). I have no problem with anybody doing whatever they like with that code, should anyone wish to.

[Rob Beezer]

Dear Alex,

That is quite fun! Thanks very much for posting - I've already learned a few
things from poking around in the source.

For anybody else who wants to try this, the "Answer" button was not functional
in my desktop browser, while it all worked perfectly on my phone (in Chrome).

I could see the database-creation part of this being integrated into the mbx
script. And I like the way you did nightly updates as your notes evolved.

> The source is at https://github.com/alexjbest/blota/ (I think the meat of the
> program is the file /question/management/commands/recreate.py which loads an mbx
> file into the database, the rest is just gets random questions and displays
> them). I have no problem with anybody doing whatever they like with that code,
> should anyone wish to.

Thanks for making the code available. Would you mind going just one step
further and make that explicit with an open license? You could for example just
copy the following from MBX

COPYING
legal/gpl-license-v2.txt
legal/gpl-license-v2.txt

with the right changes in COPYING (be sure to keep the copyright, that's what
allows you to provide the open license). Or you can read through:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html

That would be a big help for anyone who would want to build on your great work
so far. And I think legions of students would also thank you for it. ;-)

Thanks again,
Rob

[Alex Best]

Hi Rob,
 

For anybody else who wants to try this, the "Answer" button was not functional
in my desktop browser, while it all worked perfectly on my phone (in Chrome).

Ok I think this was an issue with the jquery not being loaded over https so I've changed that and it should hopefully work now!

 

Thanks for making the code available.  Would you mind going just one step
further and make that explicit with an open license?

 Sure, not a problem at all,I used the same license as mbx as you suggested.

I could see the database-creation part of this being integrated into the  mbx
script.

Yeah that would be very nice and neat, from what little I know of xslt it sounds possible to even have it output a whole app of this sort as a static site?
But unfortunately I had no idea how to do that (and still don't :( )!

Best wishes,
Alex

[Rob Beezer]

On 02/22/2016 04:23 AM, Alex Best wrote:
> Ok I think this was an issue with the jquery not being loaded over https so I've
> changed that and it should hopefully work now!

Working for me now, thanks.

> Sure, not a problem at all,I used the same license as mbx as you suggested.

Thanks very much for doing that! (Both adding the license, and sharing your work.)

> I could see the database-creation part of this being integrated into the mbx
> script.
>
> Yeah that would be very nice and neat, from what little I know of xslt it sounds
> possible to even have it output a whole app of this sort as a static site?
> But unfortunately I had no idea how to do that (and still don't :( )!

XSLT is a lot of fun and very powerful, once you get past all the
head-scratching. You are right, you could easily (I think) package up an entire
site by running an XSL conversion against the MBX source. But maybe not the
ideal solution long-term? At the moment, I'd explore mining the book and maybe
writing out some sort of JSON data structure with all the bits and pieces
necessary. Maybe then the whole thing could be an in-browser Javascript
application?

I'm going to add this to GitHub with a "project" tag and maybe somebody will run
with it.

Rob