New Quizzes: Numerical Question extension to ARRAY types

[ivo_de_pauw]

For beta sciences it would be great to have an Numerical Question ARRAY type, for instance to catch an answer like {-1, 0, 23, 0.25}.  Actually even 2D ARRAYS would be appreciated, such as {{-1, 0, 23, 0.25}, {118, -7, 0.33, 89}} Is such feasible to develop pls?

[Stef_retired]

 @ivo_de_pauw ‌

Would the instructor be able to use a fill-in-the-blank question to accomplish this? Although FITB doesn't currently accommodate rich text, the characters provided as an example are available on a regular keyboard. Please read through https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-26384-how-do-i-create-a-fill-in-the-blank-question-in-new-q... and let us know.

Thanks.

[ivo_de_pauw]

Hi Stefanie,

CC: Canvas Interface Officer

Thanks for reaching out to us so swiftly! We looked into this workaround, but it actually does not meet our (mathematical content) need for catching a complete array please. Would Canvas consider to develop on this?

Grateful antiviral regards,

Ivo

[Stef_retired]

 @ivo_de_pauw ‌, we can certainly move the idea forward for community consideration, but before we do so, would you provide one or two different examples of how fill-in-the-blank does not accommodate the type of array responses you're envisioning?

[James]

stefaniesanders,

Fill in the blank has always been a hack forced on math and science faculty because of Canvas' lack of support for multiple numeric answers. This is really a variation of a request for multiple numeric values that has been made before. One of those is open for voting right now: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/8172-new-quizzes-multiple-numerical-blanks 

The biggest problem is that blank doesn't understand the answer as a number -- it's purely text. With numbers, we can give a tolerance for an answer, so if the answer is 1.2765 and the teacher allows a tolerance of 0.05, then acceptable answers would be 1.3, 1.27, 1.276, 1.2765, but also even less obvious but still correct answers like 1.28 or 1.3102.  Anything from 1.2765-0.05 = 1.2265 through 1.2765+0.05 = 1.3265 is acceptable.

Regular expressions can help, but it is not the same and terribly difficult. I think this works, but I might have missed something accidentally and you really cannot expect faculty to do this.

/^1\.(2(26[5-9]|2[7-9]|[3-9])|3$|3([01]|2[0-5]|26[0-5]))[0-9]*$/

Along with that comes the desire of almost every statistics teacher to be able to take a single set of data and ask for more than one statistical measure from it. For example, what is the mean and standard deviation?

That should be done with formula questions, too, not just numeric questions. There's even a feature idea open for that now: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/2363-multiple-answers-in-a-formula-question 

The stimulus questions in New Quizzes allow you to ask for the mean and the standard deviation, but there's no way (that I have found) to randomly pick a stimulus, so everyone ends up getting the same question. I don't need mean and standard deviation in a random order, but I want to randomly pick the question that then asks for the mean and standard deviation.

Both feature ideas I listed provide multiple reasons and justifications as for why this would be helpful.

[Stef_retired]

 @James , I was hoping you would see this and provide a detailed explanation: thank you. The two ideas to which you linked, while clearly related, don't seem to cover  @ivo_de_pauw 's idea, and so I will open this one for voting. Thanks to both of you!

[James]

I would add that accepting it as a set, where the order of the answers doesn't matter, would be useful in other cases like "List all solutions to x²-5x-6=0"

[ivo_de_pauw]

Thank you for this!

[ivo_de_pauw]

We second this idea for SET type completely, since we would use this as well (y)

[jaevans55]

When using New Quizzes, it does not allow you to create matrices. This is critical for math courses.

Also, when using Classic Quizzes, it is not easy to create a matrix. You need to understand computer programming code. I was able to find assistance searching the help pages where somebody had written the code. 

This would be a helpful update.

Also, for math teachers, the Classic Quizzes works much better than New Quizzes. I hope as the integration continues all of the math equation stuff comes over to New Quizzes.

Side Note: When I used the feature to turn a Classic Quiz into a New Quiz, I lost many of the equations. This happened on a fill in multiple blanks question.

Thanks!

[ProductPanda]

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