Hi James,
Peter Krautzberger forwarded a GSoC project of yours to create a math editing widget for your VisualEditor project. You may recall that we met last summer and discussed our two editor projects. At the time we talked about sharing UI ideas and we might have something that would be useful.
Based on some experience that Siyavula (South Africa OER textbook and practice service) had with math teachers creating content, we designed a simple to implement math editor widget. Siyavula found that math teachers are just fine entering latex or asciimath with some training as long as they get a live preview as they type. We came up with a simple math widget that is using MathJax to do math editing. It ends up storing mathml annotated with the source format for editing (either latex or asciimath). (I think you guys just store the latex directly which is fine also).
If some aspect of this could be useful to your student we are happy to comment/help/etc. I perused the description a bit, but not in depth.
Kathi