JSXGraph and STACK: Draw a function and get feedback on your sketch

Tobias Mai

Institut für Mathematik, Warburgerstr. 100, 33098 Paderborn, Germany

Abstract

JSXGraph advertises among other things with the support of dynamic mathematics and the plotting of functions. A not so much advertised strength of JSXGraph is the potential of using the tool together with other software. We use the combination of JSXGraph and STACK (System for Teaching and Assessment using a Computer Algebra Kernel) to create a dynamic learning task that asks students to draw the graph of a function themselves and then provides them with feedback on the graph they have drawn. We would like to present this task and the prototype we developed in detail in our talk at the conference.

In addition to presenting the task itself, we will also introduce the technical details and ideas that led us to develop the task. We will show how we created an environment for drawing the graph with the help of JSXGraph and a few more lines of JavaScript code. We will then explain how we used STACK to evaluate the drawing and provide specific feedback on the quality of the sketch. The evaluation ranges from feedback about whether the sketch of the graph as a whole is sufficiently accurate to information about inaccuracies in individual areas, such as if a zero point has not been sketched accurately. Based on the discussion of the technical implementation, we also show which didactic challenges we faced while designing the task so far and how we have met them. JSXGraph not only supports the task as a means to sketch the graph, but is also helpful in the end in presenting the generated feedback to the students.

This is a project in collaboration with: Alexander Meyer, Santiago Maria Borio Peñaloza and Chris Sangwin