Abstract

At Vienna University of Technology the Maple T.A. (abbr. for Testing and Assessment) e-learning system was introduced into mathematical courses. It proved to be a useful e-learning addition to usual teaching methods. Students are able to train their calculation skills and deepen their knowledge in different mathematical disciplines outside of the lectures. Further Maple T.A. is a helpful tool to test and assess the skills of students, since it contains an assignment module and a gradebook module that provide these tasks. During the two years of usage of Maple T.A. at the Vienna University of Technology a large amount of questions and exercises were created for different mathematical topics. But with increasing complexity of the topics the creation of questions became more and more difficult. The main problems were the creation of randomly specified questions and the final grading of these questions. To overcome these challenges two Maple libraries were developed. One of them is responsible for the randomization of more complex objects and the other one aims to simplify the grading process for these more complex objects in Maple directly instead within the web environment.