[Building Sakai] The use of curly brackets in the Fill in the Blank questions (SAM-2320/SAM-2419)

[RAUL SANCHEZ VEGAS]

Hi Matthew

Using a single square bracket for the response areas does not avoid the 
problem because instructors may want to use these charactes in their 
question text rather than to use them as answer key delimiters.

We believe that if we preserve both formats (single and double curly 
brackets) we will still have the problem about not being able to use the 
single curly brackets as part of the question text. Furthermore, the 
double curly brackets solutions have the same problem because it may 
exist mathjax expressions that use double curly bracket too.

We had a local discussion and we believe that the best approach to solve 
Jiras SAM-2320/SAM-2419 at the same time is to improve the "fill in 
blank"(FIB) save functionality to ignore Mathjax expressions before 
saving the question. The Mathjax expressions are delimited between the 
'$' character so Samigo should ignore all the expressions what are 
delimited between the '$' character when saving a FIB question. Eg:

'FIB' Question text:

"What kind of matrix is this? $\begin{pmatrix}2 & 3 \\ 1 & 4 
\end{pmatrix}$: {2x2 matrix}"

Our proposal is to ignore single curly brackets within the mathjax 
expression (between $) and gets the text "2x2 matrix" as answer key 
because it is delimited by single curly brackets and not by the $ character.

In the same way, if the instructor wants to use single curly brackets to 
create a programming question he should use the curly brackets delimited 
by the $ character. Eg:

"if(a<i)${$
              a = a+i;
              i{++};
$}$"

With this proposal, we will ignore single curly brackets between $ and 
gets "++" as the answer key because it is delimited by single curly 
brackets and not by the $ character.

What do you think about it? Does it sound reasonable?



El 17/03/2015 a las 14:10, Matthew Jones escribió:
> Do you know what other LMSes do for this question type? A quick search 
> for Canvas is that they use a single square bracket 
> <http://guides.instructure.com/m/4152/l/43378-how-do-i-create-a-fill-in-multiple-blanks-question#%21prettyPhoto> 
> for the response areas. Does this avoid the problem? I'm not sure why 
> the curly brackets were chosen. In the QTI Export 
> <http://www.imsglobal.org/question/qtiv1p2/imsqti_res_bestv1p2.html#1405222> it's 
> completely broken down into separate XML sections so that doesn't 
> matter either.
>
> I *think* you'd want to keep it simple, and I also think a conversion 
> would be tricky so you'd probably also have to make both formats work, 
> the old one if someone wanted to use it, and some new one to work 
> around the MathJAX problem (which is filed as SAM-2320). In that case 
> since it's a special edge case, maybe having instructions to use a 
> double bracket would be the easiest and just preserve both formats?
>
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 5:23 AM, RAUL SANCHEZ VEGAS <raulsv at um.es 
> <mailto:raulsv at um.es>> wrote:
>
>     Hi everyone,
>
>     We would like to get some feedback about the related jiras
>     SAM-2320 and
>     SAM-2419? Both Jiras are about the use of curly brackets in the
>     Fill in
>     the Blank questions (FIB).
>
>     FIB questions make use of '{' and '}' as delimiters. What Samigo
>     does is
>     that it replaces anything they find between curly brackets with an
>     input
>     to be used as answer keys. However curly brackets are used in LaTeX
>     (MathJax) or are used for programming questions too so, right now, the
>     question text must avoid curly brackets. We've got several complaints
>     about it.
>
>     i.e.:
>
>     Question text:
>     "
>     while(true)
>     { .... }
>     "
>
>     Our first approach was to use use double left/right brackets or other
>     character for creating FIBs answer keys, so that single brackets could
>     be used in the FIB question text.
>
>     What character do you think that could be used instead of curly
>     bracket
>     to create FIB answer keys?
>
>     What solution should be done to the FIB questions that have been
>     already
>     created?
>
>     Regards,
>     Raúl
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