The Numbas Blog

Numbas v5.0

Montage of screenshots of Numbas v5

It’s time for another major version of Numbas. This release includes a radically new way of presenting questions, as well as a few other helpful new features.

We’ve made a short video to demonstrate the new features:

We’ve also made a demo exam so you can try it out yourself.

Read the rest

Recording of online Numbas training session

This morning we ran the second of our online Numbas training sessions organised in response to the coronavirus crisis.

Here’s the recording of the session:

There’s at least one more session to go, at 10:00 BST next Wednesday, April 8th. You can still register to attend. If there’s demand for it, we might schedule more sessions.

How Numbas can help during the COVID-19 crisis

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 rest

Accessibility statements for Numbas

A 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.

Programme of talks released for international EAMS 2018 Conference 

EAMS logo

The programme for the E-Assessment in Mathematical Sciences (EAMS) conference has been released, with speakers from across the globe presenting the latest developments in the field and offering a unique opportunity to get hands-on with maths e-assessment systems, whether you are a user, a developer, or just interested! The conference takes place over 3 days at Newcastle University, between 28th and 30th August. Read the rest

Introduction to Numbas workshops – June 2018

We’re running Numbas workshops this month in Durham and Huddersfield:

  • Monday 18th June, 10am-4pm, Durham University.
  • Thursday 21st June, 10am-4pm, Huddersfield University.

The workshops are a hands-on introduction to Numbas, including getting started on the Numbas mathcentre editor, selecting questions to make tests, and writing your own questions.

The workshops are free to attend and will include lunch. There are limited places available; if you would like to book a spot, please contact Chris Graham (christopher.graham@ncl.ac.uk) before June 13th.

Numbas Workshop

Out now: Numbas v3.0, the marking algorithms rewrite

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