Activate button action on WeBWorK problems

[Aaron Wangberg]

I'm wondering if this behavior is expected .... or if I am doing something wrong.

Each WeBWorK exercise or checkpoint problem has an 'Activate' button.  The page loads with the webwork problem unformatted, including answers.  When I click the button, then the problem gets formattted correctly and the "Check Responses", "Reveal", "Randomize", and "Reset" buttons appear.

Does this behavior indicate I've done something wrong? (I might not actually be connecting to a WeBWorK server, maybe? )

Aaron

[Sean Fitzpatrick]

What is the book? Can you provide a link? If it's your own book, is the source available? 

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[Oscar Levin]

In general, the existence of the activate button, which then actually activates an interactive version, is expected.  You can turn this off, so readers only see the "static" version.  But it sounds like perhaps the static version isn't coming out well?

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[Alex Jordan]

Can you show what you mean by "unformatted"?

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[Aaron Wangberg]

Sorry - department meetings :(

I'm using the book Precalculus: An Active Reading Approach.  Elementary Functions.  By Jack Green and Nick Chura

project source:  https://github.com/nick-and-jack/precalc1-MHCC

Live version:  http://wsumath.org/new_precalc/activity-describing-functions.html

"Unformatted":   Look at Checkpoint 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 on the page linked above.  They demonstrate the Activate button and formatting issues.

[  The 1.2.2 Checkpoint problem is trying to use a GeoGebra applet within a WeBWorK problem.... which isn't working 

The source is 6 - 10 years old. I'm not using the Makefile directions.

I downloaded the source from github, used the Pretext CLI to make a new project (new_precalc), and have been copying chapters and activities from the downloaded source into new_precalc project.  [ Outside of removing one LaTeX dependency in the preamble, I have only had to change "label" to "marker" on the ordered or unordered lists. ]

I am running the pretext CLI on an ubuntu server. It has WeBWorK, but I haven't tackled connecting the book to the WeBWorK system yet.

I have only run "pretext build web" to generate the output.  I then copy the content from from the project's output/web directory to the web server. 

[ I have not yet done "pretext generate webwork" or done "pretex deploy" yet, nor put any generated pg file tree from pretext into the webwork server.  ]

Thank you again for the help!

[Alex Jordan]

1.2.1 appears to be working as expected. Except maybe it could be tweaked to make the list come out as a,b,c. And there are publication file settings if you want to suppress the hint, answers, and/or solution.

In 1.2.2, I think the exercises were written long ago before we started escaping certain characters. I recall working with Nick and Jack long ago, and it looks like we were hacking to get geogebra inside a WeBWorK. That was never going to work for a WeBWorK PDF hardcopy. It's certainly not working at all in 2026. At the moment there is no way to fix a problem like that, but I could think about adding support for geogebra inside a WeBWorK. It might be too hard though if it amounts to a need to support any "interactive" inside a WeBWorK.

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[Aaron Wangberg]

Is there a way to force the problems to be interactive, rather than static?

I like the formatting, answer entry fields, hint/answer/solution buttons, and the interactive feedback provided by the interactive problem.

In the static version, the "Hint", "Answer 1", "Answer 2", "Answer 3", and "Solution" display the answers and are the only clickable/interactive things in the problem.

[Alex Jordan]

The idea is that if your page has hundreds of WeBWorK exercises, we cannot allow you (and especially a classroom full of students in a computrr lab) to load the page simultaneously with the exercises all immediately being interactive. That would flood the WeBWorK server which is rendering them all, and cause problems. In an ideal future, something could control rendering them one at a time. But for now, that "something" is a human clicking the Activate button.

I'm still thinking about those GeoGebra WeBWorK problems. I have a short term solution, but might be able to offer a better long term solution in a bit.

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[Mitch Keller]

In terms of the answers and solutions being visible, that is a setting that you can control in the publication file for the project.

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[Aaron Wangberg]

Thank you - that makes sense for the Activate button.  I hadn't thought thought of a classroom of students using the book all at once.

I don't think the Geogebra applets interact with the WeBWorB content - but I have seen cases where that makes sense.  I'm interested in what you figure out.  [ My fallback hack was to edit the HTML pages and get it to display just above the webwork problem. ]

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[Alex Jordan]

Maybe at some point, while we are collecting static representations for each webwork exercise, we could also collect HTML renderings. And on the first page load, rather than asking the webwork server to render every problem, it just uses those initial HTML renderings. Then I can imagine letting everything be active from the start.

Some partial solutions for the GGB issue.

1. Do what you did, and move the GGB interactive outside of the WeBWorK exercise. It's not ideal because now that WeBWorK exercise has much less utility outside of the book. For example, if you loaded it in a traditional WeBWorK assignment. That might not be a concern for you right now.
2. Or change those exercises to just use a local .pg file. That is a feature that is only 1–2 years old, not available when this project was written. This will still fail to produce a static rendering of the GGB applet. That is what the `PTX =>"A GeoGebra applet."` bit is about, sidestepping a static rendering and just writing that text.

IIRC, these exercises don't play with the actual answer submission. They are just for students to play with to help discover answers, then they type them in. But in general, we can have webwork exercises (outside of PTX) where you do something in the GGB applet, then click submit, and it's right or wrong based on what you did with the applet. Adding support for that in PTX would be nice.

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