Re: [seul-edu] New application: WIMS

[lp <prevettl@cochise.cc.az.us>]

Felipe Bergo wrote:
> 
> I've just seen this on freshmeat, played a little with the math games, it
> really looks interesting, sorry if it was posted here in past:

> WIMS (WWW Interactive Mathematics Server) is a CGI Web application
> designed to host interactive mathematical educational activities such as
> exercises, computational math, and graphing tools. It features automatic
> score processing with strong anti-cheating mechanisms, virtual classes
> allowing teachers to guide/control student works, online exercise
> creation, animated graphics, a message board allowing inline mathematical
> formulas, and more. It can also be easily used for education within other
> disciplines.

> .........................................................................
> Felipe Paulo Guazzi Bergo - Free Software Developer
> bergo@seul.org | guazzibe@ic.unicamp.br | http://143.106.7.13/~guazzibe
> Campinas - SP - Brazil - Earth
> 
> * Mainframe: the biggest PC peripheral available.

WIMS is great. At Cochise College we host one of the mirror sites
for WIMS. We use it mainly for a front end to math applications
like Pari-GP, Gnuplot, Maxima, MuPad, Povray, Octave, and other
math applications that our students might encounter at a major
university. For instance, we can't afford a site license for 
Mathematica or Matlab (our budget is $300 a year for chalk),
but we can expose our students to Maxima and Octave which are 
similar GPL applications for free. WIMS also has message 
boards that support Latex/TeX markup and chemical equations.

NEW FEATURE
-----------
WIMS has a new search engine called the Distributed Encyclopedia 
of Mathematics. It is only accessible from the main WIMS site in
France. It is very useful and I have found a lot of good links
on many topics. To access it click on "Other Web Resources". 
(The creation of this feature was partially motivated by the 
closure of Mathworld due to a lawsuit with CRC Press.)

http://wims.unice.fr/~wims/wims.cgi

SPANISH TRANSLATION OF WIMS
---------------------------
We need some help translating WIMS into spanish. Several people 
here in the Southwest U.S. indicated they would be willing to 
help translate some of the pages into spanish, but they have 
been unable to find time to commit to the activity, so not much
progress has been made. If anyone on the SEUL mailing list is
interested in translating some WIMS pages into spanish, please
post a message to the list or contact me.

L. Prevett
Mathematics Instructor
Cochise College, Sierra Vista, AZ, US
prevettl@cochise.cc.az.us