STACK Maxima

The systems and instances that are to be connected to the cluster must be specified and activated. For this purpose, please contact us via stack-support@gwdg.de. The service is operated as a bronze cluster (SLA). When an enquiry is made, the pure Matematica commands are transmitted without personal data; communication is encrypted using SSL.

For the installation, the STACK plug-in must be installed first. The steps for setting up Maxima should be skipped here. After setting up Maxima, the option “Server” can be used, where only the corresponding URL has to be selected. MathJax must also be installed before the installation so that formulas can be displayed on the web pages.

In order to add STACK as a plugin to an existing Ilias system, the following steps must be carried out (see also the corresponding instructions for the STACK plugin for Ilias on Github:

1. Create the subfolder Customizing/global/plugins/Modules/TestQuestionPool/Questions/.
2. Clone the Project in the created subfolder.
3. The plugin should already appear under Administration > Plugins. Update it, install it, update the languages and then configure it.
4. Select “Server” as the platform type and select the Maxima version to be used.
5. Select the corresponding STACK-Maxima URL from the table in the goemaxima documentation and enter it in the “Server configuration” tab and select “Any” as the usage.
6. To check whether the installation was successful, there is a “Health Check” tab. Here you can check various functions of the plug-in.

To use STACK as a plugin for Moodle, the following four steps must be completed. The examples use the method via Git and $MOODLE_DIR is the directory of the Moodle installation (see also the corresponding documentation of STACK:

1. Necessary modules:
   • git clone https://github.com/maths/moodle-qbehaviour_dfexplicitvaildate.git $MOODLE_DIR/question/behaviour/dfexplicitvaildate
   • git clone https://github.com/maths/moodle-qbehaviour_dfcbmexplicitvaildate.git $MOODLE_DIR/question/behaviour/dfcbmexplicitvaildate
   • git clone https://github.com/maths/moodle-qbehaviour_adaptivemultipart.git $MOODLE_DIR/question/behaviour/adaptivemultipart
2. For the Moodle question type, you still need to install:
   • git clone https://github.com/maths/moodle-qtype_stack.git $MOODLE_DIR/question/type/stack
3. The question type “STACK” now appears in the admin area in the “Plugins” tab. Here, “Server” must be selected as the platform type, the Maxima version must be chosen and (as with Ilias) the necessary URL must be chosen from the table in the goemaxima documentation and entered as the URL of the Maxima pool.
4. The installation can also be tested in Moodle via a health check script; a link should appear at the top of the configuration page for the plugin.

To get an overview of the various possibilities of creating questions, it is useful to create a pool of test questions. Instructions for creating questions can be found here. The first step is to create a question pool. To do this, the option “Stack Question” can be selected in Ilias in the magazine under “Create Question” and the question can be created via the command “Create”. On the linked Github page, an XML file with various sample questions can be downloaded, which will be used for illustration purposes in these instructions. The file can then be uploaded to Ilias via “Import Question from MoodleXML”. If everything has worked, you should find a list of different question types in your pool. For Moodle, you can create a “Question Bank” for STACK in a course and then also import an XML file. What this ultimately looks like can be seen in the GWDG News article 6/2023, see the link at the bottom.

Which version to use can be confusing at first, as there is an Ilias/Moodle version, a STACK version and a Goemaxima version. These do not always fit together and must be chosen accordingly. This can be checked on the Project page. According to the selected version, there is a corresponding server URL that must then be selected. If it is still the wrong version, the “health check page”, which is available for both Moodle and Ilias on the plug-in page, issues a corresponding error or warning message.

• STACK website: https://stack-assessment.org/
• Maxima website: https://maxima.sourceforge.io/
• goemaxima documentation of the mathematical institute Göttingen: https://projects.academiccloud.de/projects/netzwerk-mathe-digital/wiki/maxima-stack-server
• Gitlab page - STACK plugin: https://github.com/ilifau/assStackQuestion#first-installation-of-the-plugin
• Official Ilias website: https://www.ilias.de/en/
• Official Moodle website: https://moodle.org/
• GWDG News: Article in GWDG News 6/2023