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Mathqurate

Aqurate has now been superceded by Mathqurate. The project was originally part of the JISC funded MathAssess project, which involved Caret at the University of Cambridge and the University of Southampton. The project started October 2008 and completed March 2008. MathQurate continues to be developed as part of the FETLAR project.

Mathqurate is a project to develop a QTI item authoring tool, similar to Aqurate, but also able to process items containing mathematical content. It is a multi-platform, open source authoring tool for QTI2.1 content. Various versions are available:

For users

Mathqurate screen grab

Mathqurate installer release 1.0 for Linux* and Windows (16th April 2010) This version includes a new base "blank" question that is more in line with the QTI material being produced by the FETLAR content partners. It also includes an attempted workaround for the issue with Java 6 on Linux and the Swing/SWT integration libraries.

Mathqurate 1.0 for Mac OS X** - Mac users are strongly advised to upgrade to this version to bring their installation in line with the other platforms.

* Issues on Linux - you will need to ensure you have a Sun-branded version of the Java JRE installed. Others might cause problems as they have incomplete implementations of Web Start. For example, the OpenJDK which comes as standard on Ubuntu.

** Issues on OS Leopard (10.5.x) - the Eclipse libraries for Mac used by MQ need to run in a 32 bit JVM, but on Leopard, the default for Java 6 is to run 64 bit. The easiest way to resolve this issue is to make sure you have Java SE 5 set as your primary JVM. Go into Java Preferences (you can use Spotlight to find it) and set it there. Snow Leopard should not need this as its Java 6 accepts the parameter to switch between 32 and 64 bit correctly.

General Issues - You may receive a message while working saying that TinyMCE has stopped responding. You should select "ignore" and enable the option presented to suppress future errors like this.

About Mathqurate

Mathqurate can create, load and save the core QTI 2 question types required for mathematics. A walkthrough is provided on the QTITools wiki. A question previewer is a incorporated to show the author how the question is presented. Questions can be uploaded and downloaded to the Minibix item bank. As indicated, the tool runs on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms (Java JRE 1.5 or later is required).

Try tickets from Minibix to get started, particularly question number 14.

For developers

Mathqurate is written in Java. It uses the Eclipse SDK, XULRunner from Mozilla and the Tiny MCE JavaScript HTML editor. The tool is designed to be extensible, where more feature can be added as required. The program features the same MVC architecture used in Aqurate, but is a complete re-write from the ground up.

Mathqurate is distributed under the New BSD licence, as are the libraries and other technical resources from partner institutions on the FETLAR/MathAssess/QTITools projects. Additionally, building the application or using the web start installer, will entail the automatic download of a number of third party libraries that use the following additional licences:

  • • LGPL
  • • Apache
  • • Eclipse Public
  • • Mozilla Public

The JTidy library uses an "MIT like licence", which can be viewed at http://tidy.cvs.sourceforge.net/tidy/tidy/include/tidy.h?view=markup.

Developers should make themselves aware of any potential implications inherent in these licences if developing our components further.

Programmer's documentation is also available. The source code is available at the FETLAR Sourceforge, here.

Get involved!

If you would like to contribute to the development, or feed back comments after using the tool, please send an email to Graham Alsop or Paul Neve.