Asking students to provide a mathematical term that possesses certain properties, generates a better understanding of a problem and STACK offers great tools to examine answers the student provides.
Unfortunately, the build in answer tests can only evaluate different types of equality and Maxima itself is only helpful to a certain degree as soon as inequalities are involved.
In this presentation I want to discuss how we deal with the following question in moodle:
“Find a sequence that is strictly monotonically increasing with an upper bound at s=5”
We, as teachers, have some methods to determine whether the answer of a student is correct, and based on experience, we will usually pick a method, that is convenient, and we know certain assumptions concerning the index in our formula that allows us to determine whether an inequality holds, something STACK/Maxima lacks.
Since the question above is supposed to be graded automatically, we had to come up with a method, that works with STACK.