fractions and exponents

[tomkaus]

Math teacher using captivate 5.  I want the student to be able to answer questions where they must type in a fraction or exponent as part of the answer. (horizontal fraction bar, not a slash, and superscript not up arrow) Seen textbook companies offer software that does this but additional costs to students. Are there widgets out there that might help?  Want the answer to look like this. thank you.                            

[Jim Leichliter]

Welcome to the community Tom!  Would it suffice to use an image like the above but put Text Entry Boxes (TEBs) into the spots where the student has to type an answer?  I would love to see that math solution you're talking about.  Is there a demo site?  Or perhaps you could use screenr.com to video record your screen so we could see what you're after?

I do know that there's MathJax:

http://www.mathjax.org

Khan Academy uses MathJax... but MathJax is for displaying equations only.  You have to compute your own correct answers.  I can see incorporating MathJax with the free Web Page Widget to display "text selectable" equations inside of Captivate vs. equations that are just inserted images.

Jim Leichliter

[tomkaus]

Thank you for your kind and encouraging words.  I have 2 months to get serious and learn some things.

The sample question would be to use the distributive property to simplify:

Using TEB's would work however I think that would give away the "look" of how the answer should be written.

I guess what i am after and what i have seen is the following: on the screne the student would have an option to press a fraction button, an exponent button, among others and as they type their answer in the answer box if part of the answer is a fraction they press the button and a fraction appears like below or after the letter a if it needs an exponent they press the exponent button for that:

    hope you understand what i mean.   thanks again for your reply i will check out those sites.

tom

[Jim Leichliter · Accepted solution]

Kind of like this site?

http://www.dragmath.bham.ac.uk/demo.html

Captivate doesn't have any widgets like this.  One would have to be custom made.  If you do anything in Captivate out-of-the-box, it would probably have to look something like this:

http://www.mathopolis.com/questions/q.php?id=302&site=1&ref=/algebra/equation-formula.html&qs=314_30...

It uses images to display the equations and you could use a Multiple Choice question to show the possible answers.  Not quite what you're looking for, but Captivate isn't really designed for Math.

Jim Leichliter

[RodWard]

What about using drag and drop widgets to assemble the formula from an array of possible draggable components?

Trial versions of these widgets can be downloaded from here.

If you use the Interactive Drag and Drop widget you can have multiple widgets on the same slide and trigger different actions according to when their correct matches are assembled.  For a more complex interaction, tie several drag widgets together under an Interactive Master Widget.

[RodWard]

One more thought:  You can drag TEBs too.

[Jim Leichliter]

Cool idea Rod and a great use of the drag and drop widget!  Would be neat to see an example of this in action...

[tomkaus]

thanks rod

I had my administrative assistant look into purchasing the "whole shebang" today.

just means that i have more learning to do.   I love it.

[tomkaus]

Jim i appreciate your time and finding that website dragmath. That is pretty much what i was looking for. I still will play around with it. Went to Khan academy to see how they ask questions with exponents - they use multiple choice (at least that's what i saw in my 15 minutes there.)