Hi All,
I inquired about this a while back and thought I should inquire again before I spend some $$$ on one. I am about to buy Math Magic for my Mac.
I am a Math instructor for a Non-profit in San Francisco, CA. Basically, I prepare at-risk young adults for a Basic Math competency exam. I teach Basic Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Fractions, Decimals, Stats/Probabilty, Integers, Measurement, Word Problems (all at a basic level - Junior High/ 1st/2nd year of High school). I need an App to make worksheets/ quizzes.
So I am looking for an App that can meet my needs. It would be a bonus if it supports Geometry so I can include Geometry problems (angles, basic shapes, and am able to customize my own shapes).
I would prefer one App that can do it all.
I would appreciate some suggestions.
Thanks!
Hi,
LaTex / Tex is excellent for what you need to do - but their is a learning curve with LaTex.
However Lyx is a graphical LaTex editor that is available for the Mac.
http://www.lyx.org/
hth
Fred
I haven't really used it much, but doesn't Open Office Math give you what you need? It seems to cover all the basics, and it integrates in with Writer (Insert|Formula).
(I don't use a Mac, so I don't know how well OO runs on one).
[quote=mmcbride]
I haven't really used it much, but doesn't Open Office Math give you what you need? It seems to cover all the basics, and it integrates in with Writer (Insert|Formula).
(I don't use a Mac, so I don't know how well OO runs on one).
[/quote]
I have tried Open Office and it sucks! Doesn't seem very user-friendly to me.
"it sucks" is a bit of a sweeping statement and it is also not actionable. What sucks? How should it be made to suck less? I use it all the time and have for the last 10 years or so and I just love many features such as the presenter console in Impress and the OpenGL transitions (think they are only on Linux though). Writer serves me well when writing documents, but so would a wiki or HTML page to be fair. I do statistical analysis and graphs in Calc, which I then copy to Google Docs for sharing with others or making graphs I can insert into web resources (such as the ones I maintain at http://wiki.ubuntu-women.org/UbuntuMembers for example). I haven't used the database thing because I really don't see the point in desktop relational database applications, I use MySQL if I want relational things and CouchDB if I want an object store. Other than the database bit which is a concept that I think sucks I have not bumped into much suckage in the OpenOffice.org suite.
[quote=Alan Bell]
What sucks? How should it be made to suck less? I use i[/quote]
The equation editor is similar to the one on MS Word which I hate because it is very time consuming to enter equations, whereas with Math Magic for instance it is easier and more efficient to use but $50 usd more..LOL. I am not very technical so it is hard for me to be more specific as to why.
[quote=curiousone]
[quote=Alan Bell]
What sucks? How should it be made to suck less? I use i[/quote]
The equation editor is similar to the one on MS Word which I hate because it is very time consuming to enter equations, whereas with Math Magic for instance it is easier and more efficient to use but $50 usd more..LOL. I am not very technical so it is hard for me to be more specific as to why. [/quote]
To actually address the question, as well as OpenOffice math and LaTeX if you want good typesetting you might want to contemplate mediawiki math which is a plugin to a standard mediawiki instance that gives equation functionality. Having a flick through the Ubuntu repository there is something called Axiom which may be a bit too advanced, there are any number of function plotting tools in 2d and 3d. There is openoffice.org-dmaths which is described as:
"Dmaths is software that integrates with office suites OpenOffice (free),
StarOffice and NeoOffice (Mac OS X) and which aids scientists and those
who wish to edit mathematical formulas and / or scientists. It also directly
use your favorite drawing software and incorporate graphs functions in a
document."
Kig also sounds promising:
"Kig is an application for interactive geometric construction, allowing
students to draw and explore mathematical figures and concepts using the
computer.
Kig supports macros and is scriptable using Python. It can import and export
files in various formats, including SVG, Cabri, Dr. Geo, KGeo, KSeg, and XFig.
This package is part of the KDE 4 education module."
I don't know if anyone has built these for the Mac, but you can always run Ubuntu in Virtualbox or parallels or whatever.
Perhaps he means it is just the equation editor that sucks? Since I have never used it I don't know but I'd be surprised if it is that bad. There is support for these things from the OOo discussion lists. discuss [at] openoffice [dot] org and dev [at] education [dot] openoffice [dot] org for example. Make suggestions in the discuss list about how it might be improved.
Could also be worth searching for a MathML editor, like FireMath or JEuclid. There are lots of them, I have no idea how good they are (I use JEuclid as a software component, but I haven't tried it as a standalone app).
I am not quite so religious about OpenOffice, it has its faults, but for knocking out a few worksheets with formulas and diagrams I would have thought it was more than adequate.
Try GeoGebra www.geogebra.org/webstart/4.0/geogebra-40.jnlp
* it's free and Open Source
* it runs on Mac, Linux & Windows
* Getting nice equations is reasonably easy, type eg:
f(x) = sqrt(sin(x))
FormulaText[f]