Now that face-to-face teaching in many institutions has been cancelled in response to the coronavirus crisis, many lecturers are looking for ways to move their teaching and assessment online.
We’ve put this page together as a reference to describe how Numbas could be used to help your students and to replace paper-based assessments.
Read the restA few people have asked us for an accessibility statement before they start using Numbas, so we’ve written one.
In fact, we’ve written two: one for the exam interface seen by students, and one for the editor.
The statements describe the accessibility requirements that we’ve designed Numbas around, some tips on how to use Numbas effectively with different assistive technologies, and details on the outstanding accessibility issues that we know about.
If you’ve got any feedback about the statements or accessibility in Numbas, please let us know.
We’re releasing another major version of Numbas. This release incorporates a couple of exciting new developments, which greatly expand Numbas’ capabilities.
If you want to dive right in, have a go at the demo exam we’ve made to show off the new features.
Read the rest
The short story: We’ve written an extension to Numbas which adds a data type for handling quantities with associated units, and a custom part type which asks the student to enter a value with units. Read the rest
Today we’ve released Numbas v3.0. It’s the thing I’m second-most proud of producing in the last year (my daughter was born last October).
The marking code at the heart of Numbas has been completely rewritten, to make it much easier for question authors to change how students’ answers are marked. This has also allowed the introduction of custom part types, to make it easier to use and reuse different marking algorithms. Read the rest
The international conference on E-Assessment in Mathematical Sciences (EAMS) is a three-day academic conference organised by Newcastle University taking place 28th – 30th August 2018.
Building on the success of EAMS 2016, the conference aims to bring together researchers and practitioners with an interest in e-assessment for mathematics and the sciences, with an emphasis on enabling attendees to have a go at creating material, and getting an opportunity to share expertise directly. It will consist of a mix of presentations of new techniques, and pedagogic research, as well as live demos and workshops where you can get hands-on with leading e-assessment software.
Over three days, EAMS 2018 will comprise a mix of talks and hands-on activities:
Compared to EAMS 2016, the emphasis this time is much more on enabling attendees to have a go at creating material, and getting an opportunity to share expertise directly.
The call for talk and workshop proposals is currently open. If you have some research or an innovative technique related to mathematical e-assessment that you would like to present, EAMS 2018 is the perfect venue. The deadline for talk proposals is May 31st.
The conference fee is only £75 and includes a conference dinner. You can find out more about EAMS, as well as the forms to register for the conference and propose a talk, at the conference website, eams.ncl.ac.uk.
During our project to create material for students making the transition to university, I did a bit of development work on Numbas based on issue that our interns raised. I’ll describe those here. Read the rest
This Summer we’ve supervised a group of student interns creating a bank of Numbas questions to support students making the transition from school to university. The genus of the project was the realisation that many degree courses around the university require a level of mathematical ability that students don’t expect when they apply, and might have lost in the years since GCSE. We aimed to create a bank of practice material that students can be directed to, following diagnostic tests or visits to our maths support service at the start of the academic year.
Bradley, Lauren, Stanislav, Aiden, Elliott and Hannah have done a sterling job, creating over 150 questions in six weeks, covering topics mainly at the English GCSE level (exams taken at age 16, and many students’ last encounter with formal maths). Read the rest
The sigma network is hosting a free workshop hosted by the Mathematics Resource Centre, University of Bath on Thursday 31st August, 10:30-16:30.
This event will provide:
There’s more information on the event’s page on the sigma website.
In this series of posts, we’re highlighting questions we’ve found on the public Numbas editor which do something innovative or are of particularly high quality.
This question by Dr. Tom Stallard of the University of Leicester asks students to interpret a graph showing the temperature of a material as it is heated. The graph is dynamically generated using the JSXGraph extension, and a table shows some of the physical properties of the material.
While quite a simple question pedagogically, I like how the dynamic graph in this question displays information to the student in an intuitive format.
We asked Tom how he uses Numbas in his teaching:
I am an Associate Professor of Planetary Astronomy at Leicester. I use Numbas for the College of Science and Engineering Foundation Year, teaching the module Heat and Energy. I use Numbas both as a teaching aid, providing randomised questions at the end of each lecture that the students can use to practice with as the course continues, as well as a form of continuous assessment, with a set of randomised questions every two weeks that the students can re-take to a passing grade. Because the students use these questions extensively, I make sure to include a broader range of randomisation, so that not only the specific numbers, but the aims and content of the questions can change each time the question is asked.
Thanks to Tom for releasing this question under a CC-BY licence, so others can reuse this question freely!
Try this question now, on the Numbas editor, or have a look at the rest of Tom’s freely-available content.