The Development of Mathematical Web Manual Creator using CAS and Web Connectivity Technology

Abstract

Recently, CAS(Computer Algebra System) is changing its size and type to be able to build web contents for mathematics education without any additional process for web publishing to be a web-based Instruction. Following this trend, We developed phpMath, a CAS based web contents developing tools for making various type and enormous sized web contents design much easier by applying the advanced web linkage technique of CAS to the aspect on the automation of instruction design. We present our prototype of a web manual creator that is based on MSP(Mathematica Server pages) technology embedded in webMathematica. This tool gives courseware authors more simple ways to make their own mathematical web contents. The final application called phpMath can generate MSP-driven documents automatically using Mathematica commands typed by users. In other words, phpMath users can make interactive dynamic mathematical web contents even though they do not know anything about web server, HTML, and webMathematica. Additionally, This paper introduced a Web site made by phpMath for mathematics education which make it being able to dynamic calculation and interactions between student to content. This manual explains totally 23 functions in Mathematica, showing that phpMath makes it possible to build a various dynamic mathematical web page such as numeric calculation, graphic processing and mathematic symbol calculation. After all, an instruction system designer or instructor using phpMath can spend time and cost to develop a better effective mathematics education web contents materials instead of spending time and cost for learning knowledge of using CAS on the matter of building mathematical web contents. And a learner will be able to use the web manual provided by phpMath to make himself (or herself) perfectly learning the contents given by instructors.