You might notice this update was published in December: November was a busy month!
The Numbas runtime and editor mainly got bug fixes this month. There’s a big new feature in the LTI provider: the ability to automatically remark a resource after you update the exam package. This has already become invaluable for us, with more lecturers than ever setting Numbas assessments and misconfigured marking becoming more common. The remarking feature should be considered experimental: we’ve used it on a few assessments, but I expect to uncover bugs and limitations as we use it more often.
Numbas runtime
I’ve tagged version 5.2 of the Numbas runtime on GitHub.
- Enhancement: Custom part types check the data type of each of their input options, and automatically convert compatible types. (code)
- Enhancement: There is now a
diff:annotation for variable names, to render differentials. Thanks to Lorcan James for adding this. (issue, documentation) - Enhancement: The entire Numbas runtime (the
scripts.jsfile included in exam packages) can be loaded in a headless JavaScript enviroment such as node.js. (code) - Enhancement: The labels “Rows” and “Columns” on a matrix input are localised. (issue)
- Enhancement: There’s a new display rule
timesDotto insist that a centred dot ⋅ is always used as the multiplication symbol rather than a cross ×. (issue) - Enhancement: The
stringandlatexfunctions when applied toexpressionvalues now take an optional list of display rules to configure the rendering. (code, documentation)
- Change: Pattern-matching: if “gather as a list” is turned off, named terms inside lists aren’t returned in lists unless they match more than once. (code)
- Change: When displaying
rationalnumbers, they are reduced to lowest terms. (code for plain-text display, and in JME)
- Bugfix: Custom functions written in JavaScript have the JME scope flattened, so that old functions written before scope inheritance was introduced still work. (code)
- Bugfix: The
range except Xoperation returns integers when appropriate. (code) - Bugfix: The default value of true for the setting “Allow pausing?” is correctly applied when an exam only has one question. (issue)
- Bugfix: Leading minus signs are correctly extracted from nested expressions while pattern-matching. (code)
- Bugfix: Hopefully the last ever bug fixes related to Internet Explorer – I hope to drop support for it next year when Microsoft ends support. (code)
- Bugfix: Variables defined through destructuring are restored correctly when resuming a session. (code)
- Bugfix: When the scheduler halts, halt all signal boxes. (code)
- Bugfix: The checkboxes answer widget for custom part types deals better with being sent an undefined value. (code)
- Bugfix: The legend for matrix inputs isn’t shown for the expected answer. (code)
- Bugfix: Cleaning an answer of
undefinedfor a number entry part produces the empty string. (code) - Bugfix: Slightly improved the rendering of the brackets around the matrix input on Safari. (issue)
- Bugfix: The mathematical expression part’s built-in marking algorithm has default value generators for
decimal,integerandrationaldata types. (code)
Numbas editor
I’ve tagged version 5.2 of the Numbas editor on GitHub.
- Enhancement: When you create an exam, it’s automatically set to use your preferred language. (issue)
- Enhancement: In the part marking algorithms tab, marking notes are shown even for invalid inputs. (issue)
- Enhancement: The Extensions and scripts tab of the question editor has been split into separate nested tabs for each of extensions, functions, rulesets and preambles. (code)
- Enhancement: The preview rendering of LaTeX while editing a content area uses display style when appropriate. (issue)
- Bugfix: Fixed an error when browsing a project but not logged in. (code)
- Bugfix: Access control is applied to the links to download source of exams and questions. (code)
- Bugfix: The preview and embed views for questions and exams scale properly on mobile devices. (code)
- Bugfix: I made some more changes to colours and keyboard navigation, to improve accessibility. (code)
Numbas LTI provider
I’ve tagged version 2.9 of the Numbas LTI provider on GitHub.
- Enhancement: Each resource now has a Remark tab, which provides an interface to rerun all or some of the attempts at the resource using the latest version of the exam package, and optionally save any changed scores to the database. This has been on the wish-list for a long time. At the moment, consider this experimental: I expect to encounter bugs as we use this on real data. (issue, documentation)
- Enhancement: I started work on automatically testing an exam package as it’s uploaded, to check for some obvious errors: that it starts correctly, the expected answers for each part are marked as correct, and a paused attempt at the exam can be resumed. It works on my development machine but we need to do some upgrades on our production LTI server, so it’s switched off by default at the moment. (issue)
- Enhancement: The attempt timeline view now groups items produced within one second of each other; the score column is only shown when the score changes; the whole thing now runs lots faster. (code)
- Enhancement: There’s now a global search tool for administrators. You can search for users, resources or contexts. (documentation)
- Enhancement: There is now a link to review an attempt from its timeline and SCORM data views. (issue)
- Enhancement: The “Maximum attempts per user” setting for resources now has some help text explaining that a value of zero means no limit. (issue)
- Enhancement: The colours used to represent incorrect, partially correct and correct answers to questions are the same for the attempts listing and the stats page, and a bit more readable. (issue)
- Documentation: I’ve added a page about data handling to the documentation, giving some detail on what data the LTI tool handles and how access is controlled.
- Documentation: I’ve added a note about web proxies to the installation instructions.