lahvak / diffyqs-webwork

Notes on Diffy Qs (differential equations) WeBWorK (online homework) problem set

Notes on Diffy Qs WeBWorK Problems

A set of WeBWorK problems for courses teaching a class with the Notes on Diffy Qs textbook.

Coverage is Chapters 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, and appendix A. It should have enough for a normal ODE course which uses 0, 1, 2, 6, 7 or perhaps 0, 1, 2, 3, 8 (and maybe A) if doing systems. Chapters 4, and 8, are a little more sparse. Section 6.5 has only one problem so far. There are a few problems for 5.1, but not enough to run the whole chapter.

How to use?

To use, download https://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/diffyqs-webwork.tgz and upload it to your WeBWorK course. It should automatically unpack and create the right directory structure. Then in the homework editor go to import and then import sets using the "def" files from the diffyqs-webwork directory. Alternatively go to library browser, look into the diffyqs-webwork directory, and pick problems one by one.

You could also just unpack this directory into your templates directory, or even clone it directly from github. In this case, make sure the directory is named exactly diffyqs-webwork for the set def files to work.

Where did the problems come from?

The problems were mostly picked off from the Open Problem Library and modified (some more heavily than others) to fit the style and notation of the book. A number of new problems not (yet) in OPL were created and added, though most of these have in some form now been also contributed to OPL.

The problems are essentially the same problems as those that are in the Edfinity Notes on Diffy Qs course, which imports from this repository. I will keep this repository more up to date, and every once in a while the Edfinity course will update from here.

I've cleaned off the OPL tags as they are no longer needed, and some of them were downright confusing and many were just wrong, especially after the edits, and they just made editing a bit more of a pain. I've left the authorship information where it was present to see who the original author was.

Miscellanea

make-defs.sh creates the basic .def files by listing the .pg files. So do not edit the .def files themselves, they'd just get recreated at some point.

make-tar.sh creates the tar file useful for uploading directly into WeBWorK. This will create all the right directory structure.

stats.sh gives statistics on number of problems and number of problems with solutions in the various sections.

Branches on GitHub

master branch is the current version, that should be always usable. Since the best way to work is to work on several machines at once, new development is likely to break things for a little bit so there is the ...

develop branch, where new things are done. Once they are tested, they will be merged into master. This branch will get merged onto master very often, usually the moment everything is tested and fixed up on the WeBWorK machine. So most of the time the two branches should be identical.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Edfinity for pestering me to motivate me to put these together and to Andras Balogh for using the exercises and reporting errors.