
Show HN: Open Notebook – Software for creating digital math worksheets - jaltekruse
http://jaltekruse.github.io/OpenNotebook/
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jaltekruse
Hello all, as it's a show HN post it's kind of implied, but I am the author of
the project. Please feel free to leave feedback or ask questions here. Thanks
so much for checking out the project, be sure to share it on your social
networks with your friends with an interest in education!

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sixhobbits
Definitely a needed product. I've seen too many people creating geometry tests
in M$Word. Would be great to see this actively developed. For now, I noticed
that x^2 leaves a space between x and the superscript 2. Would be a (hopefully
easy) improvement to have the space removed.

~~~
jaltekruse
Thanks! I just pushed a commit to fix it. I actually destabilized it a little
when I refactored to start writing unit tests. I won't be publishing a new
binary right away, but it should be soon. Also working on a cert to avoid the
unknown developer warning.

~~~
sixhobbits
Great! I already found the variable that defines the space to add before an
exponent and recompiled and it works great now. It would also be nice if
variables were displays in a maths font (or at least in italics). Looks like
you've done quite a bit of the rendering work from scratch though so maybe
this is more difficult.

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ytjohn
This looks pretty interesting. It looks like the main use case is to make
worksheets that students have to solve. I feel like this project shares a lot
in common with ipython notebook[1], though I don't know of a way to publish
interactive notebooks. There would also be a bit of a learning curve to
understand python. Still, I wonder if it could be done, something similar to
nbviewer[2].

Imagine if this notebook
([http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/jckantor/CBE20255/blob/ma...](http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/jckantor/CBE20255/blob/master/notebooks/West%20Virginia%20Chemical%20Spill.ipynb))
could be interactive, leaving a blank cell for the solution and students could
fill it in and save it. If you distribute the file, students could run it,
once they installed python/ipython. Or, one of the cloud IDEs (c9.org)

1: ipython notebook - [https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/A-gallery-of-
interes...](https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/A-gallery-of-interesting-
IPython-Notebooks#entire-books-or-other-large-collections-of-notebooks-on-a-
topic)

2: nbviewer - [http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/](http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/)

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ivan_ah
Very interesting project, since it combines an authoring tool for teachers,
printable worksheet generator functionality, and "quiz tool" for students to
use.

The random problem generation functionality in particular is very powerful. It
reminds me to the random problem generation API in the khan-exercises
framework, but with a different interface. Instead of requiring teachers to
learn JavaScript to generate problems, they just have to learn how to use the
problem generators for different type of problems. Generating generators for
_all_ kinds of math problems will be a lot of work, still, it's nice to see a
new take on the problem.

Another promising project in the same space is
[https://ximera.osu.edu/](https://ximera.osu.edu/) [latex --> (js,pdf)
exercise generator]

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jaltekruse
Thank you for the kinds words, I did try to put a lot of thought into the
feature set to make it useful.

I have seen a number of tools that are similar, one way I wanted to set this
project apart was with a simple interface that even non-technical teachers
could use. I decided early on I wanted the application to be latex-free.
Creating the equation renderer from scratch was a bit of overkill (the
engineer mindset "oh it'll be easier to write myself"). This is something I
hope fix and instead plug in a more complete and better tested alternative
like JLatexMath, with actual editing capabilities. Pulling the editor out of
this application looks promising
[http://mirai.sourceforge.net/](http://mirai.sourceforge.net/).

If you look at Khan-Exercises they have actually moved away from automatic
generation (see their Perseus project), because it was too hard to write the
kinds of problems they wanted. Also internationalization when the content of
the questions was dynamic caused them more hassle than it was worth. I am
considering de-emphasizing content creation and focusing on the student
solution interface, as I believe it is the more novel feature of the system.
But for now I wanted to get some teachers using it and find out what they
found useful.

------
jaltekruse
Video Demo:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnBE76kY2cw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnBE76kY2cw)

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ausjke
This is nice, a bit similar to DIA or Visio, relatively intuitive.

Would love to have a web-based system that can generate worksheets and grade
them.

~~~
jaltekruse
Thanks for trying it out! We are working on integrating the software with
Moodle and other course management systems so that I don't have to force
schools to adopt a new service grade the assignments.

