Math Formula Presentation

Describe the feature – provide a general overview

The math formula presentation is intended to provide the web browser an easy to view format for complicated math formulas. Some chemistry equations that are used, such as the quadratic equation, cannot be easily viewed in traditional text format. Chemistry problems may also require the use of complicated subscript, superscripts, and/or symbols. We want a feature that enables viewing mathematical formulas in a professional manner. Unlike most of the other features of ChemTutor, this feature is not very user focused. It is meant to help the user better understand the information on the website, but it is not meant to handle user input or interact with the user in any way.

What had to happen before someone reaches this page, e.g., user must be logged in and have certain authorization privileges. Link to earlier feature as appropriate, so that we can easily reference the requirements for that feature.

This feature should be available across the entire site and will be used during the student's session while doing practice problems. Practice problems may include complicated math equations in the question or answers to the problem. We would thus need a way in which to depict formulas in practice problems in a visually appealing and understandable manner. If ChemTutor eventually implements written articles to describe information we may need to represent mathmatical formulas here as well. Another area this may be implemented is in the explanation of problems. It may be required to show a complicated math equation in the solution to a problem or in the explanation that pops up when the user gets the question wrong.

We will require a student to login and to be doing practice problems before the student ever interacts with our feature.

Describe what a user sees: what are the input fields, what are the results displayed, what order are they in

The user should only see the mathematical formula in a way that is comprehensible and logical to an incoming freshman student. As user interfaces are vastly important to our project, we will also ensure that the mathematical formulas are as visually appealing as possible. The input fields of this feature will be the formula itself. This may include HTML tags describing certain parts of the mathematical formula. The input will not be seen by the user. The user will simply see the output of a nice mathematical equation.

Describe the options for what a user can do. Be specific. (May be tied with fields in earlier section.) What is required of the user? Any input that needs to validated? Any constraints? (Perhaps a user must fill in two fields or only one of two fields.)

Again, for our feature nothing is required of the user because our feature does not handle user interaction or user input. What a user does is simply view the mathematical equation. We should not require the user to do anything else. The input should be automatically generated by whatever program is using it. For example, if we are generating mathematical equations for practice problems, the mathematical equation should be automatically generated as a professional looking equation by our feature.

When a user enters input or clicks a button, what are the possible outcomes? Examples: if user enters erroneous input, what happens? if user does one of three options, what happens in each of those cases?

Our feature does not require user interaction, but rather is used when displaying content to a user, so we do not have any current requirements other than the student needs to be able to view the equation. There are questions that remain:

1. Should the student be able to highlight parts of the equation?
2. Does the user need to be able to type the equation in a pretty format?
3. Will we include explanations about how the formula was generated?

We also need to ensure that the way we display our formulas is accurate on all browsers and all systems. It would be very bad if part of the equation was not displayed due to incompatibility with a web browser as such an error could make it impossible to complete the given practice problem.

Describe some typical situations of what a user can/will do. May want to put this earlier, but may not make sense unless you explain the other stuff.

We will use this mostly when user views practice problems, more specifically problems dealing with mathematical equations. These may include algebra where fractions are used, or the quadratic formula or chemical equations. Also, we will use this feature when viewing subscripts. This may be the case when looking at elements of the periodic table, when viewing both atomic number, atomic mass, isotope charge, or any other property of chemical elements.

Relative priority of feature (high, medium, low)

This is currently at low priority. The functions can be represented with current basic symbols and we do not necessarily require a “pretty” formula to obtain functionality. For a fully developed and professional looking project, we will eventually need to have this implemented. However, as of now, this is simply a visual feature, and is not essential to the functionality of the website.

That said, many parts of the application rely on this seemingly small feature to convey mathematical and chemical information, which is an integral point of the website. Our standards of presentation should be high because in such a user based application, to be used by students and teachers, a large part of “functionality” is interpretability and even aesthetics.