Math Scratchpad is a software project with goals to develop an interface that allows students with physical disabilities to work out math problems without the need for a scribe (a person to write the math work out on paper). Its intentions are not to compute mathematical expressions for users, but instead format equations. The application features will be problem numbering and grouping, math outlines, step-by-step alignment and formatting, the ability to cross out terms for canceling, and formatted printouts.

Process

The plan was to extend a basic math interface. Different interfaces for mathematics were explored. There are many products that deal with mathematics having diverse languages and methods for dealing with the subject. Mathematica, for instance, is a well-known commercial solver that includes a math interface, underlying language, and solving kernel. MathCAD and Maple are also commercial solvers that have math interfaces and methods for communicating with a solver. Scientific Workplace is a WYSIWIG editor for LaTeX that provides the ability to send and receive solving commands to Maple. In evaluating these interfaces, we found both desirable and unwanted features that Math Scratchpad needs. We also ran into limitations with the proprietary nature of the commercial software and began looking into the publicly available math languages and applications written for them.

Two emerging math language standards are OpenMath and MathML. Their grammars are described in XML document type definitions (DTDs); the new Web format for structured documents. At the time of our evaluation, OpenMath did not have an established standard, which made it less appealing. MathML, on the other had, already had a standard and several software applications that used it.

Since MathML has promise as a universal mathematics language, we decided to implement Math Scratchpad in Amaya, an application that implements MathML. We chose to use Amaya because it gives the user the agility to present, edit, and print MathML. It also has facilities to view, create, edit, and publish web documents. Amaya currently implements presentation MathML, HTML 3.2, and subsets of HTML 4.0, XML, and cascading style sheets using CSS 1. Amaya is also available on several platforms (Windows, LINUX, and Solaris) and is open source. Amaya is an ongoing research project that continually changes.

Conclusions and Results Achieved

A large amount of time was spent learning Amaya, a large project and piece of software relying on an abstract notion of a document represented by THOT (see references). An interface for Math Scratchpad was developed, which we then tried to build on top of Amaya. Unfortunately, time ran out before completing this final phase.

Introducing students to research software such as Amaya is very valuable. Two years (rather than one) would be a more reasonable time frame to understand such a piece of software and then use it to build a further application.

1. Vincent Quint, I. Vatton. An Introduction to Amaya, World Wide Web Consortium, February 1997. Available online at www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-amaya.
2. Vincent Quint. The Languages of Thot, August 1999. Available online at www.w3.org/AmayaUser/languages.html.