Interactive Worksheets

Summary:

A desktop application to read and write interactive worksheets allowing embedded graphs, calculations and answerable questions. Possibily as an additional value-added task, an public website where teachers and/or students can share their own worksheets.

The plan is to build in Python, utilising useful modules such as matplotlib and numpy, allowing readable text and executable code alongside one another in a single document. This document will be readable and executable - providing the opportunity for students to experiment with changing values etc, generating graphs/diagrams/results as they go to aid understanding.

This is similar in concept to worksheets available in MathCad Explorer such as the ones here http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/msn/book/worksheets.html and the work done here on WebLab http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/users/santoso/Software.WebLab.html

Target audience is teachers of children aged 10-18, for aiding independant learning.

This would have many uses in teaching subjects such as Maths and Physics, but with a website providing open submissions the number of worksheets available would increase and provide much greater value to the software. One specific usage would be teaching of programming - with Python embedded the worksheets would be interactive and would have instantaneous feedback.

If the software was set up in a school (one usage scenario) it could be configured to return results to a server. Worksheets could return statistics from integrated questions allowing teachers to target areas of weakness amongst the students.

About Me:

I've been developing in Python for 4-5 years now, since before I began my degree. I carry with me an interest in improving education from when I was myself at school, and believe much more could be done to improve the current situation. I like the idea of freely available education material, and believe that teachers - rather than large publishers - should be empowered to provide this material by working together.

I've also done two summer placements working in C++ and completed a medium sized group project in Java.

Contact Info: mp1206@soton.ac.uk, msn:matt_porter@hotmail.co.uk

Schedule

Start of program:

Work begins

- Establish useful areas to focus on

- Establish requirements

- Investigate similar applications and their methodologies.

- Develop GUI interface, with functionality to add text

- Develop code embedding functionality, allowing a document to be executed

Midterm evaluation:

At the midterm I hope to have a functional application that can save and load documents. Simple code can be embedded (just python, not necessarily any libraries)

- Work on other potentially embeddable objects - graphs, equations, diagrams. Establish a common interface that can be used.

- Documentation - User guides for both teachers and students. Create interactive worksheet to guide them through adding code etc.

- Testing